It is yellow–yes, bright yellow, because that’s my favorite color—and I would be driving it, of course, because I know where I am going. The top is down on the sunniest of days, and I am wearing a dress, a scarf, sunglasses, and the basket and the bag and the towels wait patiently in the back seat. These things take time, after all.
I take the long route. It drives you crazy, I know, but it is all worth it, this journey. I love to watch the scenery, to feel the wind and the sun and your hand absentmindedly grazing my shoulder, finding a curl that escaped protection, now twirled gently around your fingers, now pulled, a little less gently. We will be there soon.
Summer will come, I am convinced, despite these cool evenings and rainy days. Summer will come, and we’ll find a place to park. We’ll open the doors and run, run, through rocks and sand and water and sun and laughter and the calm that waves bring us. We’ll find it: we’ll find June.
We climbed. It had been too long since we had done this: too many days, weeks, months of living in our minds, far from earth and air. I had nearly forgotten.
My son and I made our way west to the hills, the small towns and the pastures, remembering a time when life was sweeter, simpler perhaps. But then again, no. It just feels that way when you look back in time. You forget the complications that filled the days and remember every moment in just one glorious moment, a boy holding berries in a bowl on a clear Vermont summer day, and you think that this is what life always was back then. You forget the times the electricity going out for days at a time, and the fleas that bit your ankles, and the dirt and the manure spreaders and the people at the town hall who mocked you privately–not so privately–because you were not one of them. You forget the dishes and the laundry and the clutter on the dining room table and the emails, and life becomes nothing but a berry tart cooling on the back porch. It was all right then, all right to be a little different, all right to let the bread rise and to have this life this wonderful life of clear days and berries and little boys.
And little boys grow up. They do! Right before your eyes they grow up and become little men, or big boys, and some days the difference between the two seems enormous; some days it hardly matters. And when we are hiking in the woods up a mountain, it does not matter at all. We are hiking, and the bugs are fierce, so we do not make it to the summit. It is humid, if not hot, and the sweat is sticking to our backs as we make our way through the woods, higher in the green wildness, sweeter still by the faint smell of lilacs, or clover. Oh yes, this I had forgotten, this sensual journey in life, these days now of the best things we find on this earth.
We climbed Mount Greylock yesterday, not to the summit. But we climbed. Then we drove. We stuck our heads out the windows, and looked at the hills, green hills, hills with cows and limestone and ponds. We drove, crossed back up into Brattleboro, across to Keene, and then back down, down toward home, slowly, slowly finding our way through this state, this state where we truly can drive one direction for two hours to find mountains, another direction to find the ocean. We passed the deer crossing, the duck crossing, the bear crossing, and saw none of those animals, but crossed beavers, cormorants, pileated woodpeckers, wrens, and finally, close to home, our friendly heron. And then we found home, a porch and iced green tea. And in the evening I sank into my bath, hills still in my mind clearly then as sleep sank into me, moments to remember, later, when enough time has passed for my mind to play tricks on me, when I remember only the things that really mattered.
It was a heron there, lumbering above the water—always auspicious, or so I had deemed these sightings years earlier. This was a new road, to another person, a home visit, the dispensing of some help, or hope, as the job requires. Sometimes a call comes from a nearby street, sometimes on a road miles away.
Hard to offer hope when life dispenses bad news. Incurable diseases, life-altering accidents, or something gone wrong from birth: this is the world I see day after day, home after home. I offer not hope, though, but options, or so my job says. I offer options for people to stay in their homes, or anywhere out of a nursing home or whatever other institution may beckon the likes of them. I offer options for lives gone wrong, for lives to be right.
What I offer more is time, and ears to hear the stories of these lives, often long, memories entangled among old thorns that grow sharper as the years go. I wish to tell these stories, but to do so would be betrayal. I absorb the stories instead, and hang them to the roads I see, the birds, the trees and paths that lead me to them and away.
These miles are oddly satisfying. Wandering has never been my forté, despite youthful dreams of faraway places. The town, the people: yes! That sort of adventure… But in my adult life, I have sought roots, community, company, laughter, support. For all the wishes for exotic locales, I found adventure, then grew up. I craved what I might have left behind. The lonesome road never held much appeal for me, at least, not as a way of life.
Some hitch a ride with the wayward wind and head off to never-ending adventure. Such is the cult of the cowboy, the loner, the rebel. It is a romantic notion, this wandering, this quest. It may offer refuge, in its way. The road may offer a way out.
And you? Wander on, go, if you like. If you do, your door remains shut, your home ever empty. Perhaps I’ll never find you.
The road may offer a way in. I had forgotten that. I had forgotten the road long and winding that leads not to wandering, but to a door, the door. I had forgotten the odyssey. I had forgotten you.
The crazy thing about mental illness is that it is so often coupled with absolute and incredible genius.
Phil Spector was found guilty of second-degree murder this week. It was a horrible crime, though not inconceivable to some that Spector could have pulled the trigger that killed Lana Clarkson six years ago. It seems that there was not a lack of evidence that Spector was one troubled individual.
RJ Eskow writes about the verdict in the Huffington Post as the death of “madness chic”. It seems that the man whose first hit came from an engraving on his father’s grave had many demons. Family history, perhaps: Spector’s father got things off to a start by committing suicide. The stories pouring out during the trials and before were often–as Eskow notes–the stuff that celebrity insanity is made of.
But still, I doubt that “madness chic” will ever end. When I heard Spector’s name in the news again, the first thing I did was to dig up a Ronettes album. Guilty or not, Spector produced a sound that at its best is simply sublime. After all, I want a “Marshmallow World” when winter comes around. I want to believe in a wall of sound that is as great in the real world as the space it creates in my imagination.
Mental illness besides, it is hard to reconcile these things, the beauty and the terror. I do not know how we make sense of a world that seems damned to have both, and often so intricately entwined. Abusive relationships thrive on this sort of cognitive dissonance. So do all sorts of scams. We so sincerely want to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds. We want there to be a rhyme and reason for all the bad things that happen to people. Somehow, there are no victims, only people who deserve it–if not in this life, then as punishment from a past life. How in our world could a nice guy hurt his wife unless she provoked him? How could a person who produces an eternal piece of splendor also destroy another person without justification? It simply doesn’t make sense, and we will defend the appearance beyond the facts for as long as we possibly can.
Come to find out, there is a term for this. “Magical thinking” (see Psychology Today’s article by Matthew Hutson on this in the Mar/Apr 2008 issue) may well be our only hope. It turns out that at least to some extent, we need to believe in our good world simply to survive in it. But what then do we make of the incongruities when they slap us in the face?
We are shocked. We do not want to believe. We pray the facts are not true. And then, we grieve.
We seek resolution. In the end, life is nothing if not a paradox. In the world of creativity, then, believing in a sort of “madness chic” can make the bad-behind-the-scenes stuff all okay. Rather than pushing the starving artist and the eccentric musician to the madhouse, they go to detox, and reserve their place in our society. It lets us have our beautiful-beyond-belief, never-ending cake, and the devastation of watching as the artist eats at it himself, and with very bad manners.
The concept itself of “genius” was not celebrated before the age of Romanticism. In the Romantic view of genius, inspiration is not for everyone. Certain people have a gift above and beyond the previous conception of talent acquired through diligent practice. Gifted programs in schools now thrive on this notion of thinking “outside the box,” honoring the spirit of schoolchildren who do not sit quietly and learn, but who are bored and doodling strange pictures and tapping the other students because the classroom is insufficient for their advanced minds.
Pushing the boundaries is good, necessary, and hardly new: our world would have long ago become stagnant without it. In the realm of artistic expression, we cherish this creation of something new from nothing. It is the essence of magic, and it feeds our souls. Pushed to an extreme, in a sort of iconic worship of the creator, we may encourage narcissism. We may sometimes leave room for self-justification of criminality in some people–for some very real people, whose impulses good and bad remain all too human. Ah! but are these creators not greater than ourselves to some extent? Are they not immortal, if by the eternal existence of their creations? We do believe in these gods, if in human form. Perhaps genius trumps mental illness, de-stigmatizes it, at least on some level. At least, until something terrible happens.
In the real world, mental illness truly can be a sort of hell. As much as those who do not live with it on a daily basis may accept the illness of a creative genius, we who love a person with mental illness often grasp onto the rose that grows so improbably from the ashes in this hell. The beauty is sometimes the one thing that reminds us of our love. But it is never the whole story.
It was a quilting party that day, my mother remembers. A quilting party, and she, little girl then, was allowed to stitch her part between two of her mother’s friends. It may have been one of the quilts that are downstairs on beds now, pink fabric uniting the memories of a family’s wardrobe, worn and recycled in this most marvelous of ways. So my mother, lady that she was at the advanced age of four years old, sewed, and then was distracted.
The distraction was a knock at the door. A man with a camera offered his services, and my grandmother, feeling generous that day, as she did many other days it appeared by the cat symbol on their fencepost, let him in. Yes, a picture would be quite nice, it was decided, and my mother positioned herself on the wicker couch. Her mother put a bow in her hair. Inky, one of the black cats (the other being Egbert, not present), jumped up on my mom’s lap, and the picture was complete.
The photographer visited for perhaps three years, and made pictures all of those years. Some of those photographs seem to be missing now. But this one–my mother’s favorite picture of herself–remains on a shelf in her living room, with all the memories of a childhood and a life whose pieces, retold, are precious layers of our own lives.
Warm rain Wednesday put me into a more apt mood for the month, a mood of bliss, a reconsideration of the landscape and the season. Who could not be enthusiastic about March’s longer days, the kiss of sun, however short-lived?
This mood juxtaposes that of my previous post, I realize. What a grump! I was gently reminded of the idea that spring could be a good thing just shortly after I posted that last installment, called simply “march”. Well, that hardly sums it up.
The reminder of what the season symbolizes brought me to past years, when winter was so long. By winter, I mean deprivation and suffering, cold isolation and pain. I realize that the season can have its beauty, and indeed, the cold period of my life did have its brightness, too.
In Vermont, spring is a long and tortuous process, as the world buried beneath snow reappears, rusted, aged, rotted, or at least a bit worn down. Sap runs, and steam rises from the maple houses for some time as the days get longer. Ice still coats the surface, until at last the ground softens, oozing, cracking and heaving. Ferns pop up magically, and the hills change from white and gray to pink, then green.
I had left Vermont by the time I found a spring in my life. I looked around at what stuck out as the sun shone upon it, and found myself emboldened to tell a secret that I thought incredible. When the person I told believed me, I ran home and wrote it down. Like finding a precious clue buried beneath layers of dirt, I scrubbed the surface of that life, there all along, and found that the secret was much bigger than I realized. I wrote for many days, and then went back and showed my words to that person again. My words, written, held the truth of my world as I discovered it–there always, only invisible. My words, ultimately, transformed that world. But not by themselves. No, this renewal came only half from its creation; it had to have a reader, a helper, to make it real.
Spring comes here melting and blooming, and brings a summer that we do not yet know. What will grow in this climate? What was planted there? And what will we do in this landscape? The sun will shine, soon, and in the heat of the day, we will watch the world grow, trim it, edit and transform it as if it had never been dead to us. This is as it should be. We will change our growing world, and take it for granted, and love it, even as we create still another season in our life.
Why such a fascination with this month, of all months? March. March Hare. Ides of March. It is really not a pleasant month, after all. St. Patrick’s Day. Easter, perhaps. Passover, maybe. Spring.
March is all full of hope and symbols of renewal and whatnot, and still manages to disappoint, to frustrate, to dump inches, feet of wet snow, useless snow melting, radiating penetrating cold, with wind to add to it. What good does it bring us?
Spring promises so much. We embrace that fluke warm breeze, the shadow in the late afternoon. We want more. We want to shed our coats, walk, ride bikes, open the porch door. I want to. I want to be warm again. We have to wait. March makes us long for spring, as if it will never come.
And does it, really? Does spring really exist? Is the gradual warming in our imagination? Is spring anything more than occasional summer-like conditions thrown into the mix of winter itself, offering nothing more than a tease? A stick, a stone. Mud. Águas de Março.
Every time spring comes around, I think of Jobim’s famous song. “It’s the promise of spring. It’s the love in your heart.” And I had an image in these “Waters of March” of things budding in the woods, birds reappearing, snow melting. In that multitude of images (”It’s stick, it’s stone, it’s the end of the road. It’s ..), I always imagined winter ending. At least, I did, before I read the lyrics in Portuguese.
“São as águas de março
fechando o verão
É a promessa de vida
no teu coração.“
No, March is not always the spring it seems. Turn the world upside from where I sit, and March is September.
“They’re the waters of March
closing the summer.
It’s the promise of life
In your heart.”
Here in the northern hemisphere, I find myself mostly in a bad mood throughout March. All that “in like a lion” stuff wears thin as I keep looking for the lamb in the deal. I grump by, just wanting to be done with the month. Now, this is Massachusetts, though. March can be challenging in Missouri, where I grew up, as well. In Vermont, syrup runs, but I never let myself consider spring that early. But fall? It hardly entered my mind.
I remember once getting a letter, in June. It was cool there, grey. Not cold, but on that South American coast, winters were melancholy, but not so bad. Winter, in June… I knew, but never really thought it through, all those holidays that we think of for winter, flipped into summer holidays. Winter, quiet, with relatively few of them… perhaps as winter was meant to be.
And March, a rainy time, ending summer, Carnaval at the end of summer–not winter. And in all that, something seems just right.
On the living room shelf of my childhood home was a book. In fact, there were countless books on our living room shelves, so many stories, voyages, words that saved and transported. But the one book I most remember, the book I am destined to inherit (my mom tells me) is the book of British bedtime stories.
Now, I believe the name of the anthology is not quite that, but it was something similar, and we always knew which book it was, with its thin pages and countless tales. I have googled the real name, looked in all sorts of ancient booksellers as I am tempted so often to search for my past now, but the copy that my mom has remains the only one I know of. The treasury was my introduction to so many writers: Forster, Joyce, even Wodehouse.
To put this book in its proper context, you must know that my mother is an Anglophile. She has never traveled to Britain, regrettably, and it seems at this point that she probably never will. Her England is one of dreams, Monty Python, Bleak House, murder mysteries, Spode china, Christopher Robin, the Lavender Hill Mob, tartans, Glyndebourne, Shakespeare recalled in senior learning series classes… England would indeed suit her, I am sure, if she found any bit at all like the stories we knew so well.
I may have been around thirteen when I first took down the book. The story that then struck me the most was one by John Galsworthy, “The Apple Tree.” It was a story of a grave at a crossroads, love forgotten, then remembered, lovers from vastly different worlds coming together, impossibly. It made my teenage heart dream, planting all sorts of bucolic fantasies of splendid love and possibility and rapture and heartbreak.
I find a sort of safety in these recollections, a delving into origins, language slightly altered by the crossing of an ocean, humour defining the way that we can speak the same language and still look at the world so differently.
Primary shades, plus white and green, in the simplest shapes. Equilateral triangles of a skirt, part of a pine tree, or something more abstract. These were the forms that made stained glass of our front windows, names written to read from the street. “HI MOM!” a great welcome home.
I played with Colorforms when I was little, though I do not remember actually owning them. They were not the same forms that now are scenes from television shows (though I am sure it would be easy enough to craft a SpongeBob). I am not sure they even made that kind back then. The pliable, indestructible shapes were fun, inexplicably, and became so once more later, on a mirror during my younger son’s occupational therapy session. He liked yellow–still does–and would stand and reach to peel them from the glass, hard as that was for him. I searched for those old toys then, when my own children were young, and found them in the strangely anachronistic world made possible by the internet. There, with so many other treasures, were the cherished playthings, and I bought them.
For all the toys that made their way into our lives over the years, it is the simple ones that remain now that even the youngest has nearly outgrown most things. What is still here? Legos are ubiquitous in this world, with their many functions. Blocks, too, in similar fashion. Paper, to fold, to draw on, to tear, and all sorts of things that decorate it. Scissors. For all the flashing lights and brand-consciousness, even way back when, we quickly noticed that a tickled Elmo–the narcissist–continued to laugh long after we did. We play to explore, not simply to watch. We play to define our own selves, and not to be defined. And if we are lucky, or wise, we may be distracted, but we always return to those things that allow us our own creativity. In that, we show the world who we really are, somehow… maybe a red circle with a yellow triangle, arranged just so.
I am amazed still, everyday, at the full and utter abandonment our society encourages for those who find their lives altered in a single moment. Illness strikes, an accident, and life somehow becomes smaller in some ways. Alone, some face a future that treats them differently, as less human, simply because they need help. Indeed, this need is what defines us perhaps most as human.
Surprisingly, cynicism has not yet caught me. I see a rainbow of sorts, black and white and all shades of gray, a light however dim at the end of the tunnel. I remain astounded by hope and adaptation, and by the goodness of those who do care. I remain shocked by impatient staff who snap at people who have done no wrong, as much as I may see the plight of the underpaid worker. I remain shocked at the efforts of the kindest workers, underpaid, undervalued for the work they do in these most human moments.
We may find our humanity in our own moment of crisis, but perhaps a better measure is in our response to the crises of others. Can we forgive helplessness, or does it push us away at its demands for our assistance? Can we simply stop, listen, or are we ever distracted by the noise of a world that ignores all but the strong?
Listen. The voices are quiet sometimes, impatient themselves at other times. They tell stories, grand stories, of times not so distant, of people and faces that look different now, but still are a part of our own conscience, and of ourselves. Help. A small gesture, perhaps. A knock on the door, an errand run. It is the stuff that makes us alive and beyond appearances richer.
People age, more and more. People live through illnesses that would have killed them in the past. In this we may expect eternal youth and wellness, but in this life, extended, we are challenged, redefined. Challenge our humanity; let us meet the challenge. Forget no one, fear not, do not look away. Remember, this is us. It is our humanity, and it is the best thing we have.
