Saxon Henry's Blog, page 25

Impolite Houseguests

I had become more and more susceptible to the blues—they would come calling and stay for several days like impolite houseguests I had to tolerate. They were demanding when they visited—using a great deal of my energy as they expected one thing after another. I never invited them—I never would have because as acquaintances go, I was not fond of them at all. Let's just say we didn't get along. Maybe if I'd moved into a smaller house, I would have had the excuse that there were no guestrooms. That would have shown them! But it was too late and their visits dragged on—longer each time. Next time, I will be stronger and turn them away at the door, I promised myself; when they knock I will be ready…

While the unruly visitors were in residence, my entries in my writer's notebook took on a despondent tone: "I am one with the waterfall. I feel myself spilling over the bluff that is my life. The output continues when nothing comes to replenish the flow. I gasp for breath and, dehydrated, fall into jumbled dreams. I languish on bleak sheets, too tired to care. I feed those around me as I starve to death."

I wondered if suicide was really senseless and dallied with the idea that maybe when the pain was so great, it wasn't such a stretch. With these dark thoughts flitting through my mind, I studied a shimmering ice pellet hanging on the railing of the deck—caught by some invisible thread as it quivered at the mercy of wind-whipped patterns of chaos. It was odd to be thinking of something so momentous with about the same intensity as wondering when the ice crystal would let go. These subjects reverberated in me—death was simply on my mind—as I felt the rain wanting to come to end the dance of the pinprick of ice. I could feel it as the sky puckered its brow in petulant warning but the crystal danced unafraid, its frozen strength refusing to budge until it was ready to leave. I knew that ice was fragile when temperatures rose but for the moment, it was a symbol of strength—a trait I felt I lacked so desperately. The fact that it could perish so organically without a shred of remorse made me wonder why we humans were so terrified of letting life go.

As I journaled about how the idea of death and the act of dying were not one in the same, it occurred to me that if I'd had a stable emotional life to underpin me, it would have been impossible for me to be unhappy in a home that surrounded me with windows on the world, lenses from which the pink fresh light of a brand new day replaced starlit nights filled with trembling pinpoints of illumination as far as the eye could see. I was fascinated by how the atmosphere changed throughout the hours of any given day, the sun marking the sky as her own. She took, greedily, the tangerine tranquility of morning and bathed herself in it until she knew the world was fully awake, that each of her subjects would be awaiting her. Only then would she burst above the mountain's silhouette, leaving no doubt that she had arrived. She was vanity personified. 

I was feeling her need for attention, her intensity blinding me as it reflected from the white page, as I journaled about a friend I had dined with the night before. She was a resident alien and her "take" on our inaugurations in America fascinated me. She hailed from Holland and said that a historian from her country deemed our celebrations of an incoming president as somewhere between a coup d'etat and a coronation! She had blocked off the entire day to watch President Bush being sworn in because she said it was important to honor the process (though she did admit she wouldn't have tuned in if Dukakis had won!). 

I was ashamed of myself for feeling so frustrated with politics that I had no stomach for a day of ceremonies and I realized she proved that Americans, myself included, often take liberties for granted. It was the posturing in the political realm that made me feel as if the arguments being waged amounted to a discourse as inane as whether the world is round or flat. When would the rhetoric advance beyond whether we would fall off if we wandered too close to the edge? I wondered, feeling as if the ineptness of it all was a gigantic waste of time. 

Equally frustrating was my attendance at my first Vestry retreat for the church. The politics were just as insidious and I felt the insecurity of being a novice weighing on me the entire time I was there. I returned home to a rainy Monday, spent from the activities that found me giving my all without receiving anything in return. Worse than my outpouring of myself was the fact that our priest and Jim berated me for admitting that I had been nervous. "It was supposed to have been a relaxed time," Padre said. Jim chimed in, "She doesn't work that way; always tense…"

I suppose I was perpetually anxious but I'd never seen it as a negative thing. I simply saw it as my desire to give every moment the quality it deserved. Knowing that this was a flaw in Jim's eyes sent me into a dejected place. I was so ready to chase the light—revel in vanity like the sun—but it seemed my life was determined to keep me wallowing in shadows, as the snippets of poetry I managed to record illustrated:

The pain goes deep

The storm grows wild

and darkest night swallows

my evolution

Stars collide in a skyless void

our world lacks

true solution. 

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Did I Do Alright?

The bluff was awash in foliage for dreamers—the reds, golds and mottled yellows greeting me with great fanfare each morning when I raised up in bed and looked out onto the craggy bluff trailing off into sky. The earliest autumn leaves littered the ground like dulling confetti while summer seemed to try to hang on with a sprinkling of warm days. She was steadily losing ground to the rousing parade of hues celebrating the change of seasons. Intermittent huffs of winter had us shivering as squirrels fed on fallen acorns that would hit the deck with a thwack, bounce several times and roll to a stop in a crevice in the buckling wood slats the weather so cruelly brutalized in the exposed environment. 

When there was moisture in the air, morning meant fog's dull mask would overtake us and the waterfall would rage when rain had been present, hissing as it spilled itself over the indention in the bluff that allowed it an outlet to the rocks below. I couldn't see it when the fog moved in but its smattering filled the house. It sang me to sleep at night and I often set the alarm so I could awaken before the sun rose in order to watch the sky change. The lights of the city seemed frenetic in the cold air as daylight took over—vibrating intensely as if they were attempting to ward off the passing of their torches by amping up their energy. There was, of course, no way to compete with the sun's eminence and I thought about how so much of life was like that—a lesson in futility.  

The silhouettes of the mountains ringing Chattanooga's verdant valley seemed to meander when seen from an equal height, their profiles rugged as they rose against the soft orange that went white as morning launched herself with abandon. The trees beyond the windows looked as if they'd been stamped there—so dark against the coming day they were like a serigraph embedded in a lively watercolor. There was one bright star glimmering like a beauty mark just before the night lost its grasp on the firmament. The "changing of the glowing guard" made me question whether light in life was similar to the "light" of knowledge. Neither was consistent as it meandered through its conduits, and I felt there was a similarity to avenues of thought and paths of light, though I couldn't yet explain how. I was merely left with the question, "How far do we have to travel to grow into consciousness and is there any way to predict where the road leads?"

I was scribbling about this as we drove to Davenport Gap to scout Jim's next hike on the Appalachian Trail. We faced some wild weather as moments of intensive sunlight were followed by obliterating clouds that seemed to devour the car, spitting sleet and snow before they swirled away to reveal another spell of glaring light. The sunset was blood-orange as it bathed the hills and trees in tones that made them seem as if they were born of fire. Everything was tinted in warmth, which was such a paradox given that it was brutally cold beyond the windshield. 

We stopped at a restaurant nestled into the front rooms of a log cabin where there was a glorious fire in the fireplace. The ladder-back chairs were hard and knobby but the flames bathed the room in welcoming heat. One woman tended the restaurant—waiting and bussing tables, and keeping the fire ablaze. We were the only customers and after she read us the specials, she removed the large screen covering the yawning opening of the stone fireplace, then teased us about not bringing in any wood—a comment that had Jim sliding back his chair in order to grab some logs from the porch. She put her hand on his shoulder as she passed, telling him that she was teasing. When she reentered—followed by a blast of frigid air as the screened door slapped closed behind her—she had an armful of small logs that she tossed onto the back of the fire. The blaze caught but the flames were still a bit softer than they had been when we'd first arrived. 

"Now come the big ones!" she announced as she disappeared through the door again. Jim couldn't let her carry them by herself so he went to help her, following her back inside and standing like a good Boy Scout as she picked the pieces of wood from his grasp, placing them in a careful pattern atop the flames. "I'll scotch it now!" she announced as she placed one in the back. "Did I do alright?" she asked as she returned the screen. Jim told her she'd built the best fire he'd ever seen and I could tell he meant it. When she came to take our order, I noticed she wore no makeup and I wondered if every facet of her life was so free of pretense. I thought about her as we drove home in the dark: there was something about this woman that was so genuine it deserved attention. It didn't matter that her clothes were rumpled and her hair was disheveled. In fact, it could have been these very details that made her so interesting to me because they were the ones I couldn't shake. These bare facts made her seem more real than anyone I'd ever met, especially the women in my life who were dressed to the nines and wore slathers of makeup beneath their perfectly coiffed hair.

We were going through one of those periods of being deluged with parties, which meant we were spending far too much time with the "perfectly put-together." I was hanging on for dear life yet again, and I wrote my notebook, "This writer feels empty: no words flow willingly from her pen." The only thing that soothed me was nature and her inexplicable moods. She brought me a sparkling gift when she left a blanket of snow on the bluff—so softly and gently it fell, muting the world and making me feel like a child tucked into a nursery wearing my footie pajamas. I was noiselessly padding my way through my cloistered world when the sun came up, the woods glistening and the trees turning to pristine lace. Spaced down the bluff as they were, the frosty progression of limbs joined with the liquid that had frozen as it cascaded over the mountain's edge to create the illusion that a beautiful bridal veil had been unfurled. This was Bridal Veil Falls, as it had been named decades before on just such a day no doubt. The house was so blissfully quiet in the snow-pack that I could hear the steady rhythm of my shallow breathing. What a miracle for a winter morning!

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Night Tiptoed In

Emma Bell Miles' writings were opening me to a new appreciation for my surroundings on the bluff I was calling home. As I strolled through the woods with Sam, I tried to imagine how it would have felt to walk the fern-flanked dirt paths when she returned home from studying at the St. Louis School of Art in1899. Though she had been extremely poor by most standards, had she felt rich to have been steeped in the grandeur of these mossy slopes in her everyday life? 

She certainly used her surroundings for creative fodder, as is illustrated in this passage describing the Wild Turkey from Our Southern Birds: "Any one who has followed the trail of the turkey through its native woods, or who had made the acquaintance of some lustrous purple-legged baron hatched from a wild egg and raised in a poultry yard, will not grudge this species the phrase that has often been applied to it—'noblest of American birds.' An appreciative southern wrier, Mr. Lanier, once suggested that the Wild Turkey would be a better choice for adoption as our national emblem, instead of the rapacious and quarrelsome Eagle; but, however suitable to American ideals and character this change might be, it is not likely to take place, for the reason this splendid game bird is being killed off at a rate that insures its disappearance from all but the wildest parts of its ranges. In short, the Wild Turkey will probably be nearly extinct before the general public becomes acquainted with him…"

Fall was coming full on and the bluff was being leached of its greenness, the leaves coloring as they clung to the barely hidden branches of trees that heaved them into the dull sky. A thunderstorm raced through, bellowing as the limbs danced its bidding. I went to the screened porch to feel the drifts of mist racing up the gully, enjoying the cool moisture caressing my face. As the storm moved away, the sun radiated red-orange, spilling its hues like a paint pot someone had overturned, its contents seeping earthward until it infused the entire atmosphere with its pigments. 

I was just beginning to learn how the weather affected the spot on which we were perched. The wind would race over the cusp of the rocks that formed our foundation, blasting around the house and rattling the windows with its fury. As one gust would die, another would rush forward, its fist closed tightly to pound the door and to pummel the trees, which were forced to cling all the more mightily to the puny soil beneath their roots. The beating seemed more sinister at night as everything went black beyond the windows. I was drawn to the cold panes, curious to feel the fury of the gusts—the rattling of the pulsing glass keeping me company as I watched for shooting stars. They would arc through the sky every so often and I had finally made enough peace with my life to have wishes ready to salute their passing.

As night tiptoed in on a dusty pink horizon wedged between layers of soft blue one evening, I wrote, "I can say I will not be a writer as many times as I like but it will never keep me from writing." The next morning as the sun rose above the far horizon, I listened to the "stars" of a writer's conference read poems and fiction on public radio. The broadcast pulled at my insides, making me want to write as they had written but I was stuck in some strange rut of fearing the very thing I desired the most (and the thing what would set my spirit free if I'd only allow it).

Even as my internal angst with my identity roiled, I must have been embodying my desire to become a writer without even knowing it because a man I knew continued to approach me with his own need to accept himself as a writer. He was not nearly as far along as I was in the discipline of journaling and I felt his desire to connect with a kindred spirit ooze from him when he would seek contact with me, a needy look in his eyes giving away his internal angst. I guessed that having an exchange with someone who was struggling as much as he was shored him up, something I thought about frequently as I fumbled through my own chaos. 

As I bought myself a new writer's notebook one afternoon a thought flashed into my mind. I stood looking at the shelf of journals, lips pursed as I tried to decide if my idea would cross any inappropriate boundaries, when the doubt fell away and I decided to buy one for him. The next time I saw him, I gave it to him along with one of the special pens I favored. I wished him well when I handed it to him and I could tell it meant so much to him. The next time I bumped into him, he thanked me profusely and I could feel his anxiety mixed with joy over the book of blue-lined pages he clasped in his hands, the blank surfaces gnawing at his desire to fill them, hungry as they were for his words.

I wanted to tell him that the moment before he began his path toward a desire to write would likely be more peaceful than any moments following; wanted to tell him about how the impulse to write complicates a normal life in ways that are difficult to explain. But I decided it would be best for him to find this out in his own way in his own time. After all, that's an important part of a writer's journey, and who was I to say where his process would take him and how it would unfold? If nothing else, writing is an incredibly personal discipline, one that demands of its collaborator his or her own blood, sweat and tears…

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Mountain Song

It's #LetsBlogOff time again. This week's question, "What is the difference between fact and truth?" For a writer, it can be a slim distinction, especially when it comes to the hunger of having others appreciate the work so passionately created. But this is merely one writer's opinion; what's shaking with the rest of the #LetsBlogOff gang? Get the goods here!

* * *

We sprinted through the Miami airport to make our connection because the customs queue through which we had been processed from Costa Rica was a bogged-down mess. Once we were finally on the plane to Atlanta, my excitement was making it difficult for me to write—the fragmented thoughts, scattered words and jumbled feelings exploding onto the page in an incoherent mish-mash of joy and impatience. A friend of ours, Jerry, had made the trip with us, as had our priest from Chattanooga. It was the first time I'd been around either of them for as long as a week and I'd grown fond of Jerry's voice, the inflections that made his southern drawl so friendly had a lyrical charm that only a down-home boy could convey. He and I had laughed for days about the fact that when Jim sent the Padre to the hardware store to buy rope, he'd asked for ropa, which garnered him nothing. The clerk obviously couldn't understand why he was intent on purchasing clothing when they didn't sell garments there!

Once home, I managed to capture a few days to myself because Jim was off on a business trip. Sam slept beside me as I journaled the first morning—all fours up in the air, a snoring mass of golden-hued hair. As I stroked his belly, it occurred to me that the value of home was truly priceless. Storms had roared through the night before, trailing in their wake a shooting star. In another mood, I might have taken that as a sign of promise but I was weary and bereft. My goal for the day was to let go of my gaunt frame of mind so I could enjoy the atmosphere in which I was luxuriating as Bridal Veil Falls sang over my shoulder in an earthly percussive arrangement of smattering water against unyielding boulders. A dove's contented coo reproached me for having any feelings other than gratitude given that I was finally tranquilly at home. I'd been pouring words into my personal journal, which had helped to clear my head somewhat—there was something about spilling the quandary of my life onto its pages that always made room for a modicum of ease. The sun, which had made a personal call as it rose above the fog-choked valley, was casting long shadows on my writer's notebook and causing the point of my pen where it met the page to gleam. 

I was made for this quiet, this solitude, this calm, and I reveled in the fact that Jim's trip had given me the time to myself, which I believed would help me sort through the mess we'd made of things. As I sat there wondering what changes we could undertake that would help us right our wrongs, the wind rode up the mountain, whistling like the engine of a speeding train. It was then that I noticed it was happily marking time on the porch, its rhythm moving the rocking chair as it took a breather. I loved the idea that the undulant currents wanted to take a respite, and the fact that they had chosen my deck as a hangout delighted me to no end.

Questions as to the quality of my writing were surfacing—the realization dawning that when it was rushed my work lacked the vivacity of the material created during times of complete absorption. Had my work reached the level at which I should be so concerned with publishability? I wondered. I longed for more time for revision, but I had also seen that the process was not always my friend; that the flesh of my poetry was too tender to be ripped apart and expected to heal without exhibiting scars. Was I a skilled enough practitioner to prescribe the proper ointment for the treatment of these lesions? 

This question was a quirky one because I wasn't inclined to write what would be considered "publishable" work anyway. I simply didn't see myself creating the type of poetic constructs I saw in most of the magazines I read because I felt the work I came across in the mainstream press lacked a certain narrative beauty I wanted to achieve. And yet, I had to admit that I wrote for the approval of others because. "It's impossible for me to give myself the very thing that I need to feel accomplished: an appreciation from a source other than myself," I wrote that morning. How vulgar this looked in black and white! I thought; yet, vulgar as it was, wasn't this the truth for every writer? Even if a writer was unaware of the fact that he or she needed this give-and-take, I bet there were none among us who didn't crave attention for what he or she produced.

I finished my coffee as these thoughts reached an unresolved end, stilling my mind to focus on the sun as it broke through the cloudbank. The scene was hyper illuminated as she infused the towering billows that fanned out like a long ball-gown with her verve. How glorious would it feel for the upper reaches of your hair to burn—a filmy, shimmering cotton, torn, singed and arranged in a glittery display? I wondered. As I stared into the blazing harshness, a hawk skirted past, dipping just below our rock outcropping as silent as night. I picked up the book I'd chosen to read, watching as the attentive raptor made several circles above the falls. As I caressed the tattered cover of Strains from a Dulcimore, a book of poems by Emma Bell Miles, the hawk keened twice and then dove earthward.

I thought the moment was remarkably serendipitous, as Miles had once ambled along this very bluff gathering inspiration for her writing, her watercolors and her sketches. Had she also marveled at the quality of the light, the hawks, the waterfall as she traipsed through the woods so long ago? Her world—in the 1890s—was one of a densely forested mountaintop sprinkled only with the occasional cabin, a far cry from present-day Walden's Ridge with its pricey real estate and busy streets. 

Her other published works included The Spirit of the Mountains and Our Southern Birds, but it was her poems that moved me, and I felt grateful to have had the time to sit with them as the sun climbed ever higher in the sky, setting the yellowed surface of the worn pages I flipped through aglow:

 

Mountain Song

 

Sing me another song tonight—

Tell me a story, Love—

A queer old dear old dreamy tale

Of gulch and cliff and cove;

A song of wimpling waters where

The trout's white bellies gleam;

A story scrolled against dark pines

In wood-smoke blue as dream.

 

Sing me a song, low, elfin-sad,

That mountain-folk know well;

Tell me a tale of candle-light

In cabins where they dwell.

For O my heart has ached to these 

Ere love began to be,

And you, Dear, are but part of this,

The life you lent to me.

                            -Emma Bell Miles

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The Puzzle of My Life

It's remarkable how quickly #LetsBlogOff comes around and the topic today is "Where do you get your ideas for creating what you do…Do you have a favorite writing table or a quiet corner in your house or apartment?" My ideas have varied birthing points but rest in only one repository—my writer's notebook—which carries them forward, keeping them safe and alive until I'm ready to use them in projects such as this memoir. I've been in the hospital for a week—heading home today I hope—and I've filled page after page with sensory perceptions about my time here that I know I will use somehow somewhere. My Lucille Ball-esque run-in with the ice/filtered water machine is likely the only thing you won't be seeing recorded anywhere amongst my copious notes (a girl's gotta reserve some dignity!). To see how other #LetsBlogOff participants glean their creative ideas, click here for a full list. 

The Puzzle of My Life

We were back in Siquirres. The morning had dawned rainy, the tip-tap of large drops drumming the tin roof making me so drowsy I slept longer than I should have. When the other noises of life finally penetrated my consciousness, it was the birdsong that capped all the other sounds. It was, in fact, always difficult to ignore in surround sound but I had to admit on that particular morning there was a difference—suddenly, the twittering of the birds seemed positive, quite a turnabout for me given how negative I had been of late.  

I was far from proud of that and I wished I could learn to be different but I was having a tough time making an altered attitude stick. "Maybe it is time for me to grow up," I wrote in my writer's notebook, which was normally sturdy but was so damp it had become pliable—flexible to the point of disintegration. Was it possible that the environment here would help me to become strong if I could learn how to be more flexible or would I fall apart as quickly as this pressed cardboard book I'd grown so dependent upon?

Kimberly and Gertrude were taking the bus to Siquirres so they could have lunch with me, a break from the grind that I celebrated. I would give Kimberly the Barbie Coloring Book and Crayons I brought her. Little did I know as I placed them on the table in the kitchen they were bringing me gifts that would mean much more to me than the silly nothings I had brought from the states. Mrs. Green had sent me a wooden calendar. I was moved and humbled by its exquisite craftsmanship and the beauty of its presentation. She had made it, which meant all the more, and this level of generosity was so in keeping with the deep respect the people continued to show me. 

Having news of her made me remember how close Gus and Mr. Green seemed. They would sit for hours on the porch talking about the most inane things, and every chance I had, I would light like a fly on the wall to listen in on their musings as I crouched in the corner of the porch. I learned that Mr. Green gleaned most of his medical inclinations, for which he was touted, from his wife. She was always recommending this treatment or that one, such as a "prescription" for Marcie, who had a sore throat. Mrs. Green insisted that she mix banana vinegar with black pepper, heat the mixture, and gargle it. 

One day one of our volunteers had asked Mr. Green if he could think of anything he didn't have that he might want. He thought for a long time, his ample lips pulsing as he rubbed the knob of his chin, then finally answered, "It would be money. I have everything else." I was sitting with him one afternoon when a harmless crazy man, well known around town for his antics, passed by. He had a yellow ball cap socked on his head sideways, the bill pointing to the right making him look far younger than he was. Rick Astley's song "Never Gonna Give You Up" was blaring from the house across the street and he began dancing to it—quite well actually. When the song trailed off, he opened his mouth wide, looking side to side to see if anyone was admiring him, then held his hands up in the air, fingers splayed, as if to say, "Hold your applause!" Mr. Green and I laughed until we were doubled over in pain.

 

The rain had finally stopped and the sun was shining brightly. This was the tropics I remembered: sultry to the point of suffocating. The mosquitoes had multiplied greatly from the abundant moisture and I was battling a swarm of them when I bumped into Philip Wheaton on the way back from breakfast. A jack-of-all-trades who prided himself in the breadth of his skills, he had visited the job site several times, and was now helping with some of the new church's paperwork. He typed with one hand flying and the other resting on the edge of the typewriter—his shoulders moving back and forth with the rhythm of his characters as they indented the paper in fuzzy black blobs. 

He was tall and loosely jointed. Not too well groomed, yet not dirty. It was as if he'd been haphazardly put together and I marveled at his thin sideburns extending almost to his mouth. They angled off to a point as they reached for his lips, little more than skinny triangles of graying hair. His eyebrows were barely there, but the hair that did remain was wiry and unruly. He had a great deal of personality in his eyes, especially when he smiled. His great receding hairline was combed back, lending his sideburns more prominence and giving him the appearance of a scrooge or some other Dickensian character. I pegged him as rangy as he ambled along on spidery legs. He was almost hyper about his work, or extremely intent at the very least. As he talked about this project or that project, his brown eyes danced in his wide, creased face.

I was terribly homesick, was missing Sam so much I ached with it. I had brought a jigsaw puzzle to work and it had helped me to pass the time, but as I worked it, I thought of how simple it seemed to put together piece-by-piece compared to the puzzle of my life. I looked around the large front room with its alternating dark and light wood floorboards, walls made from the same, strong dark wood plentiful in Costa Rica—some of which had been painted yellow. In that moment of observation, I felt more isolated than I could bear but I couldn't let the longing hold: the feeling was far too melancholy. I stood so quickly the chair crashed to the floor behind me, then headed to the kitchen for a glass of water. I felt ever more alien in the sparsely equipped room with its tiny refrigerator and petite stove, which were dwarfed by a huge porcelain sink spouting only cold running water. 

I gulped down the water as I sunk into a chair covered in faded Naugahyde—the once bright pink, caramel and pert green flowers on the upholstery long faded to pastels. There was a tan mat woven from rushes under a tiny coffee table draped with a bright, though very dirty, linen shawl, which had been stitched with a decorative motive in silk threads. The furniture was straight and hard, and I sat on the clammy unforgiving upholstery thinking how relieved I was that I'd be heading home to greater comfort the day before my 31st birthday. I'd been trying to think of a way to sum things up as far as life in Siquirres was concerned and I'd hit upon the theme that life vibrated: music, birdsong, weather, the vivacity with which everyone spoke—everything vibrated. I might have given the idea "life vibrates" more power if my thoughts hadn't been as dry and cracked as the dustbowl. There was no spark for the jungle, only the excitement of going home. 

As I approached 31, I made the commitment to myself to try and rebuild whatever it was that was broken in me—not remake it as it had been but to refashion it into something stronger and real. God help me do it right this time, I thought as I packed and let the thrill of the fact that the next day I would be "home, sweet home," fill me with hope.

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Otra Ves

The anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy had been the week's big news and the media, with their usual flair, had had a field day in Dallas. I listened to NPR while I was making the morning coffee and it heartened me to hear one viewer ask, "Why don't we commemorate his birth (and therefore his life) rather than his death, as this is what Jackie and his family have requested?" The commentator almost brushed it off, finally responding, "It's because we are a nation still grieving and still puzzled about what happened. If the mystery had been solved, maybe we could be at peace with the situation and let it go." So selfish that stance, I thought; we are a nation so eternally selfish.

Our move to the "mountain house," as we had dubbed it, was in full swing. I was surrounded by boxes and awaiting the arrival of the moving van. I would be so happy to get the chaos behind me and snuggle into the new surroundings as I put life back together piece by little piece. And yet there was a bitter-sweetness to it all: it was my last morning at lakeshore and Mother Nature had sent a fogbank to wrap me in cotton wool as I sipped my hot mug of coffee standing on the deck that now had none of the homey touches it once held. The sun, dulled by the moisture's mantle, was rising ecru, its reflection dimmed on water bathed in wispy steam as the lake's warm body fended off the chill of the air.

I was pouring as much creative energy into my writer's notebook as I could snatch from my busy days—knowing my nesting into a new home would make it difficult for me to settle into any intensity of writing beyond what felt like water in the desert—a meager smattering of liquid on a vast expanse of parched sand. The mornings were becoming quite chilly, the blooms on the flowers shivering as the cool breath of changing seasons touched their softness. A cloud, flat and gray—looking cold as marble—obscured the sunrise as it floated a delicate orange through powdery blue with the day's progression. The phenomenon of a mood only a morning could hold was fleeing right before my eyes as I watched in wonder.  

As the light changed, I wondered how I had managed to build a relationship with someone whose thinking was so opposite my own. Jim and I had watched the movie Barfly the night before and as I was admiring the acting, he said he saw no point to the film; that it was ridiculous. I disagreed but knew better than to challenge his stance. As far as I was concerned, in one line, the plot made its point when Mickey Rourke's character, Henry Chinaski, remarked, "No writer can actually write in peace." The comment seemed off-handed, of course, but that was just good screenwriting and directing. The line exploded in my head,  haunted me as I slept, and stayed with me to jangle my nerves as I watched the orange sky spark into a burst of light. Could this possibly be true? I wondered. I craved peace, craved a settled life in which I could breathe and write. Would it be more of the same procrastination if I did somehow have the calm I believed would support a writing life? This thought unnerved me because it was the idea upon which I was pinning all of my hopes and dreams.

"My writer self finds only tiny cracks in which to sink her fingers as she climbs the shear rocky wall of this bustling life," I wrote later that day. "She squeezes me down to try and seep through, just as a footfall on the crack blocks her light. She muses her next move only to crash into a ravine—bruised, battered and silenced." This frustrated piece of me held sway—pouting through the throngs of life's activities that included a mix of formal gatherings and private parties, vestry meetings, and a brutal exercise class I was taking to try to punish myself back into shape. She grew even more silent during a ski trip to Steamboat even when I spent a gloriously quiet day propped in front of the fire while the others were off skiing. I couldn't eek a single word from her, and she and I seemed to be officially polarized in a nasty standoff. I just kept making notes, even inane ones, hoping I could tease her out but she was a stubborn conscientious resister.

As I settled into the mountain house, there was plenty to record. I was in awe of the natural mood of the landscape surrounding the home stepping down the cliff. The fog was different at the higher altitude—like sheets of milky white tissue paper that hung behind the trees, coming and going as it desired. The lake in the distance below blazed like a diamond when the sun burned the cottony moisture away. It was colder "on high" as well, and the wood slats on the deck sparkled with dainty flecks of ice. Frozen veins of it had carved lifelines into the glass-topped table, the pattern sophisticated and intricately elemental. 

Though I was reveling in the newness of these surroundings, it took the desert surrounding Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we went to shop for fine art for the house, to bring my writerly voice back. As we rose above the clouds on our way there, we broke into sunshine illuminating a tightly knit cloud-front that could have been a lumpy sweater made of knotty virgin wool. It was unrefined and rough, but plush. I wanted to run my fingers over it and fondle the softness, even if it would have disintegrated at my touch and wisped through my outspread fingers like the vaporous matter it was rather than the wooly coat of a sheep that I imagined it to be. 

"Snow should look like this as it falls thick and heavy, clumping here and there," I wrote, "but Mother Nature retains the control when the wet flakes fall, orchestrating the blanket to be flat and uniform, each flake joining hands with another to bond in a perfect union. Yes, control is everywhere." Why couldn't my own humanly bonds hold this level of perfection? I wondered. I suppose the answer should have been obvious—I was not even remotely in control of my situation, but then who ever is?

We drove to Taos while we were in Santa Fe, through a vastness that illustrated how ethereal rain could devour the much weightier earth, chewing great rivulets wherever it willed. The sun glowed crimson on the rocks, the sheen of the dirt seemingly aglow from within. Snow rested in rocky furrows worn by time and weather, and I thought about how this was certainly another world—stranger than any I'd ever known. I wrote a poem entitled "Otra Ves" on the plane on the way home, a few good moments entering into the mix but not much of it remaining worthy of a mention. The point of the poem is missed opportunity, particularly where dealing with Native Americans was concerned. In hindsight, I see now that life was preparing me to deal with this issue head-on. "Otra Ves" ends: "We wouldn't force custom to sleep/ We'd teach the wilderness to be wild/ We'd cling to our land like a child to its mother."

I came away from the desert of New Mexico feeling awed by the light and the landscape, questioning, Where else in the world would cacti bloom from heaps of pure white snow? And with that paradox looming, I turned away from a time of materialistic gluttony to prepare to head back to Costa Rica. What might the tens of thousands of dollars we had spent on art have done for the people we were "serving" there?

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!

I had great fun in being featured on the Building Moxie site yesterday. To see a few poems that I continued to work over the years (I didn't abandon many, only the ones like "Otra Ves" that could never find their centers) click here. 

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A World of Reverie

It's #LetsBlogOff time again. This go-around the bi-weekly confluence of bloggers sharing their ideas about a chosen subject and promoting them on Twitter is charged to answer this question: "If you could stop the world for one day, what would you take the time to do?" Well, this is not the proper place to talk about my top preference so the next best thing would be spending a glorious day steeped in working on this material, which I hope will some day take on a life of its own in book form. Thanks so much for stopping in, and hop on over to the Lets Blog Off blog to check out the ideas some of my favorite tweeps are sharing today.

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After a week's worth of struggle that found Jim and I trying to settle back into our lives in Tennessee, we managed to call a truce. We simply had to; we were heading to Seattle with a group of his business associates and it made no sense to go if we were not even speaking. When we arrived, we were shown to a room on the fourteenth floor perched above the downtown business district. The buildings surrounding us rose into the palest blue sky, interrupting distant slices of water that curved to shore and mimicked the same subtle arc of the hotel window. It was as if the spots of aqua were placed in perfect geometric alignment at the edges of the man-made scene, natural baubles to ornament the uniformity of the city's architecture.

Sailboats dotted the dissected pieces of blue, looking as though someone had tossed a basket filled with magnolia blossoms, gleaming white in the sunlight, onto the water's surface to let them bob in the breeze. Being at the whim of the tides, a cluster of them eddied toward the shoreline as the mountains rose behind them—some speaking in amplified voices of deep charcoal while others farther afield whispered in the coolest shades of blue-gray. As I pulled the heavy drapes to one side of the room, it was as if the buildings confronting me were as varied as a pile of river rocks—some slick and new, others worn from perpetually tumbling at the bottom of a swift-flowing stream. 

I took my writer's notebook to Pioneer Park so I could record my impressions of the rather downtrodden part of town. I sat on a bench and surveyed the filthy cobblestones, the dirt in between them littered with cigarette butts, and pigeon feathers and droppings. Large trees mottled the courtyard with leaves along one edge where a group of Native Americans were lolling. They were nearly replicas of each other—long black hair tied in ponytails; dark skin; faces, pocked with past acne scars, built of high cheekbones and flat noses below dark eyes. They talked of prison, hard times and detox units, the word "man" ubiquitous in their laments.

My vigil was interrupted by a dirty man carrying a soiled denim jacket and a plastic bag. When he plopped down on a nearby bench, a rush of breath escaped his lips as his butt met the wood slats. He began throwing dried husks of bagels from the plastic bag onto the stones, drawing scores of pigeons. They pecked the filthy ground, skittering into each other in their attempts to grab as many crumbs as they could. As I sat there, I had the strange feeling that I was intruding on a world of constant pain—almost as if I had not earned the right to sit on that bench which had likely served as someone's bed the night before. I have not paid my dues, perhaps, I thought, and I could tell by their glances that the ragged beings gathered in that park agreed with me.

They were certainly curious, yet they seemed to palpably hate what I represented. They openly jeered at several women passing by but for some reason they left me alone. Maybe this is an homage to my silent suffering, I thought as I made my way out of the plaza, happy to no longer feel like bacteria under a microscope. Little did I know this wouldn't be the last time I would come under the scrutiny of these marginalized Americans.

That episode convinced me that it was best to stay away from the inner city so I was happy we were immersing ourselves in nature for the lion's share of the trip. We boarded the Victoria Clipper to make our way to the British Columbian capital, and as I took a seat, I felt the rolling of the ocean rocking us as if we were perched upon a piece of driftwood it had set sailing for its own amusement. I was in awe of the vibrating hulk of a vessel that made my feet feel as if they had been hooked to jumper cables. When the horn exploded, the blast of noise was all the more startling in tandem with our lurch forward. As we clipped along, the water spraying from under the hull foamed and churned, marking a trail behind us. 

We'd not been underway for very long when I saw them: loons! I'd longed to hear them in person my whole life and here I was, frustrated to find myself locked away in a massive boat with the engines throbbing in my ears. They were tiny slips of matter floating atop the choppy straights, beaks turned downward before they dove, disappearing below molten liquid that swallowed them. The empty surface silvered so quickly I thought for an instant I'd made up the fact that they had been there at all. The cliffs that cascaded to the water drew my eyes away from the empty swaths of the sound, firs atop the gray stony plateau fingering into the sky. There was a lonesome lighthouse that seemed so desolate in its setting it made me sad to think it spent night after dank night weathering the cold alone.

As I watched Seattle's skyline disappear, the rows of statuesque cranes, their tall arms extending skyward like they were saluting some great watery dictator, made it clear this was a shipping town. In the distance, Mt. Ranier was obscured, as it was most days—smoke and haze parting only once since we'd arrived for me to have a glimpse of its mammoth shape, its snow-mottled top rising far above the other mountains with rugged, knobby tops of their own. The ring of peaks reminded me of a bumpy origami sculpture that sprawled for miles. As we passed Whidbey Island, an assortment of waterfowl traversed the choppy waters, diving and resurfacing like continual shivers on the skin of Puget Sound. 

We vibrated across the water in the gloomy gray of a northwest morning—the sun we'd enjoyed the day before locked away above a thick layer of billowing clouds. In Victoria, the surroundings were so misty that the seascape read like an endless expanse of palest graphite beneath leaden clouds. The masts of sailboats wobbled as if trying to draw rudimentary letters in the dull sky, and seals swam playfully in the harbor. I could have watched them for days as they nudged each other with their whiskered snouts and heaved themselves onto any surface they could reach. They would drape their big flippers this way or that as they raised their noses high in the air, their barks sounding like hoarse coughs as they extended their necks. I marveled at their muscular chests that puffed proudly as they let the world know they had something important to say and that they were saying it boldly. Large gulls bobbed in the harbor, waiting to be fed by tourists gathering on the waterfront walkways and I realized I'd never seen such an abundance of marine life in one place at one time.

The next day we took a trip to Rainier and I couldn't believe the proliferation of grasshoppers clicking through the air as we walked through the Grove of Patriarchs where Marmots were wooly and brazen as they posed for photos, their protruding teeth yellowed and their flat black feet shirred like a closely cropped fur coat. The mountain seemed like a felled giant, waiting for the right time to pounce as it felt our light footfalls. It made me want to tiptoe as gingerly as possible so that I wouldn't awaken his ice-covered fury. The snow gave me the impression that the top of his head had grayed from worry but what could he possibly have to fear?

It was as if the glacier faults drawn across its hulk formed a wearied brow puckered in sleep. Wild meadows running partway up the mountain's back and arms formed a burly body—like a teddy bear's, but it was clear that his thrust was far from sweet or serene. We climbed and climbed as we tried to reach his heart but he kept it hidden from us, allowing us only one patch of reachable snow, which was mottled with rock flour, during a day-climb. I felt we'd come upon as much of his forbearance as we would receive just before we crept away. I looked back toward him as we were leaving, seeing his breath form wispy clouds though his chest never once heaved with his breathing.

As we drove back to Seattle, I realized I was nervous about going home because I didn't feel I was doing anything with my life. Somehow, it was easier to pretend that this was not the case when I was absorbed in the sensory details a new environment brought to bear on the senses. Sure, I made contributions through Jim, but there was no truth in them for me so there was no satisfaction in them either. This was all the trickier since my commitment to him kept me from being myself. I felt that if I didn't begin to get a grip on this, I would be lost from ever being a truly happy and fulfilled person and partner. I wanted to find something to do that I was passionate about; I wanted to be close to my partner, but to have a piece of me that was fully mine. I somehow knew, twenty years his junior, that I needed to be a fulfilled being in order to be a good wife. I wanted to improve my self-esteem so that I could be happy, to develop my spiritual self and to learn to relax. Was this really too much to ask?

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks again for stopping in! 

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Yes, Man!

The church was growing skyward. It was almost ready for its roof, the columns protruding into the sky seeming to reach for the metal that would protect them from the waterlogged heavens. It was as if the fingers of bent rebar edging past them were desperate to clasp something, anything, to stay dry. Piles of black, sandy earth were everywhere, in place long enough for vegetation to have sprouted profusely. Weeds and spindly saplings pushed up from under clods of dirt and stones, some the size of basketballs. It was so moist that my pen made bolder indentions in the paper than I had ever seen. As it began to sprinkle rain again, I thought, Better than the heat; much better, though I was only mildly convinced of this.

I had stayed in Siquirres for the day, and my head was pulsing from the dampness, the moisture-laden air making every noise more intense. There was a great deal of sound in the outpost town. A bell clanged at the Catholic church as the priest chanted into a microphone, the words reverberating inside the big, domed concrete block building then echoing out into the streets. Roosters crowed and the train engine thrummed as the cars clanked into each other, jerking as the slack was eaten by motion. The furniture maker next door running his lathe paused, letting it sputter noisily until he was ready to make it sing again when it happily devoured the wood he fed it. Dogs barked and squealed as large diesel trucks coughed on the highway, then throbbed as the drivers employed their Jake brakes to slow down. A motorcycle fired and a baby cried simultaneously, the twin sounds creating a high-pitched drone.

When the woman next door sneezed, it sounded as though she was in the room with me—that's how little noise the wire mesh covering the windows held back. As I listened, I felt so absorbed that I transcended the noisemakers to become the noise: I wasn't the furniture-maker but the whine of the lathe. I wasn't the priest or the microphone, but the chant. I became the woman's sneeze, then, as her hands moved from her face to the dishes she was washing, I was the sloshing of the water rendering her hands raw. I wondered if her skin was as rough as the palms of the elderly black man's who had shaken my hand the day before. His fingers had felt as though he had laminated them and then roughened the plastic coating with sandpaper. He'd said to me, "Good to see you, yes, man!" The minute he turned away, I was met with the surprise of my life. Barney trundled up with a bouquet of flowers and a basket filled to the brim with chili peppers and limes. 

He handed me the gifts so self-consciously that my heart melted, an intimate moment that held only for a fraction of a second because the weather upped the ante on its terrible mood and gushed water, sending us both running for shelter. We stood beneath a tarp that Jim had strung between two trees and I struggled to think how I could recapture the mood so I could express my gratitude for his gift but he sensed my earnestness and pulled his poncho over his head, tossing back a goodbye and slipping away. As he sloshed through the thick mud toward home, I watched as he passed a pregnant dog drinking from the gutter—the filthy water rushing under her lapping tongue. He didn't so much as glance in her direction and I stood there regretting that I hadn't been able to tell him how much his gesture had meant to me. 

I couldn't begin to guess how many inches of rain had fallen in two days' time. I simply knew it was significant because my clothes were so soggy they were beginning to sour. Lying on the bed in the mornings was unfriendly because the sheets were so damp they might as well have been pulled right from the washing machine. This was difficult for me and I hated myself for it. I kept thinking that surely there was some way for me to find the strength to gracefully deal with all of the challenges I faced, but good-humored acceptance continued to allude me. 

After a brief respite of sunshine at midday, the sky scowled and the thunder rumbled yet again—threatening from a distance and growing louder with each chant. The ocean must have been aiming to free itself from its contents because water came in great torrents that obliterated everything from sight. I unpacked the goodies that Barney had given me and realized I was growing a bit more accustomed to life in a country where sweet limes were bitter and they called avocadoes pears. I would always remember mornings that dawned with jungle noises and the smoky smell of a fire lit by the furniture maker next door as he burned the sawdust from the previous day's work—neither of which I'd ever experienced in my life until I had landed on a coastal plain where moss dripped like an old man's beard from misshapen trees.

We were preparing to head home and I felt happy that I'd spent some time working on the material for "Mornings at Lakeshore" because we would be moving into a house perched on a beautiful bluff overlooking the northern edge of Chattanooga. I'd be floating far above a bend in the Tennessee River rather than steeped in the lake setting that had inspired the writing. My new world would be a levitating one that I imagined would bring its own fascinations, the newness of which I hoped would make up for my loss of the lushness of living on the water. 

I watched Jim fuss with the building as he prepared to leave the job site unattended—his expression as earnest as a mom preparing to send her child off to the first day of school. I understood his passion for what he was doing but I felt the eggshells I'd been dancing around on were becoming slicker and more dangerous as the viscous of the slimy whites thickened every time I made a pass over the crumbled mess. At what point did the tiptoeing stop making sense? I wondered. At what point did I say screw it and set my heels firmly on the ground?

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! By the way, did you know it's #WriterWednesday on Twitter? Yep!

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Slack from Hunger

We faced a setback in Costa Rica when one of our volunteers fell from the scaffolding and dislocated his arm. Jim couldn't leave the job site so it was up to me to drive the man to wherever he could receive medical care. We were in yet another tin-can of a truck—not as pretty as Donald's but it had wheels that rolled and an engine that ran reliably enough. Unfortunately it had no shock absorbers to speak of so each time we hit a bump in the rutty, dirt roads, Jenks moaned as pain ripped through his arm. Barney had sworn he knew the way to the nearest emergency room so I let him take the lead from the tiny back seat, but he steered me wrong to the point that we became terribly lost. Even with my limited Spanish, I knew the words for emergency room but he insisted on speaking with the people when we slowed down to ask for directions and, given that he'd drank three or four pints of Guaro—and it was only noon—his thick tongue couldn't wrap itself around emergencia. I finally lost patience and yelled the words when the fifth person stared at him like he was speaking in Swahili. 

With the man's help, we finally found our way to Guapiles, which had a well-appointed clinic—by Costa Rican standards—that served the workers of the town's banana processing plant (to use the word loosely). I sat with Barney as the clinicians examined Jenks, who winced as they tried to pull histee shirt up over his uninjured arm. When they attempted to lift it over his head, disturbing his busted arm, he yelled, "Cut the damn thing off!" Even after his outburst, they were so frugal they were reluctant to damage the cement-stained shirt. Jenks grabbed the scissors from a nurse and clipped the bottom edge, holding the gashed fabric up to her. She grabbed it from him and finally ripped it from his body. The next insult awaiting him was at the end of a trek to the facility's interior courtyard, where they splashed the construction muck from his upper body with rainwater from the roof that had collected in a barrel. 

I could tell by the grimace on his ashen face that he was feeling beset, understandable given that the level of medical care he was accustomed to receiving was so superior to this, and it must have made him feel all the more uncomfortable in his weakened state of mind that conditions were so unsanitary by our standards. Needless to say, he was over it by the time he'd been given a sedative and had a cast covering most of his arm. The episode really shook me up and I couldn't sleep that night for reliving the nightmare of seeing his twisted body on the rock-strewn dirt, not knowing until he stirred if he was dead or alive.

The next day, Barney had a grand time telling Jim his rendition of our road trip. The inevitable disclaimer—"I don't know the word in Spanish" was followed by, "I've been here so long, I've forgotten my English!"— peppering his repertoire to the point that it was comical. He was a small man—all of about 5'5"—with a protruding stomach that pillowed above the sagging waistband of the same pair of baggy jeans he always wore. The frayed pants were perpetually sliding down what was left of his naturally narrow hips and butt, which had become gaunt from years of inactivity. The only way he managed to keep them up was a continual cinching of a ratty leather belt threaded through the two existing loops on the waistband. The action was repeated so often it was as if he had a tick of sorts or was participating in a bizarre modern dance sequence during which his hand reached for the belt and flung the end of it in the air at waist level. He'd snap his arm straight and then lower it to his side exactly the same way each time, as if the dance's end required the formality of an Olympic dismount.

He claimed that his body was ravaged not by alcohol but by the "action" he saw in Vietnam, which was unlikely. I knew this because once when he was particularly intoxicated he had admitted to me that his supply ship had never been anywhere near warfare and that he'd been a cook, not a soldier. His face was rugged and pocked with sores, and I'd never seen him when he was clean. His head was covered in a furry pate of hair, which wasn't long but was never perfectly shaven. His mouth was drawn in from missing teeth—frozen in a sort of perpetual circle—which meant his words came out in mumbles even before they were slurred from drinking.

His eyes were large and hooded, and he would stand with his hands on his thin hips, staring off with his lids closing slowly as if he were dropping into a trance. After a few seconds of swaying, he would jerk back to reality and immediately begin to prattle on about nothing even if someone else had the floor. At first I thought he just talked to hear himself speak but I later realized it must have been the only thing keeping him awake.

He had a filthy mouth and was indignant about almost everything, including race relations. He'd been born in Birmingham and had been in Alabama his entire life until he had "sailed off to war." The small jungle village he had decided to claim as his new home allowed him to stay backwards by the sheer fact that he could barely communicate with anyone. It was clear that he stayed because he knew he would be left to his own devises as he drank, ranting and raving his way through his waning years.

The environment supported his hostility by fostering the old prejudices because no one there cared what he thought about the ancient state of affairs in a faraway country. Though he was so insultingly verbose, I tried to look beneath his diatribes and I found that he wasn't a cut-and-dried hater. One of the clues was his relationship with his dog Girl because he cared for as well as anyone I'd ever seen nurture a pet. He was always talking to her as she limped along beside him, wagging her chewed-up tail at the sound of her name. 

Another way I recognized heart in him was through his adoration of Jim. He called him Mr. Jim and would go to the ends of the earth and back for him. He was continually asking him questions about things and I watched one day as he queried why we were using the catheads we'd brought from the states on the ends of the protruding rebar. As Jim explained, his gaze followed his pointing finger to the top row of blocks and it was as if he was receiving the equivalent of the ten commandments, so great was the look of hero worship in his eyes. He followed along as closely as his Guaro-addled brain would allow, scratching his head as his puckered lips to mouth some of Jim's words a few beats behind. "Well, I'll be," he said when Jim paused to see if he understood what he'd said. "Did you hear that, Girl? We got fancy stuff here in our little town thanks to Mr. Jim, don't we?"

I'd seen Jim bring this out in people before but it was exaggerated in Barney, who seemed to have a desperate need to believe in something, and Jim seemed to be that "something" in spades. I think he loved his dog so much because she gave him unconditional love, and I suspected he'd never had anything close to that, which had left him starved for it. The only thing that made sense regarding his oversized Jim adoration was that he saw in him the kind of man he'd longed to be but had given up on when he had sunk into an alcoholic fog. He wasn't so unlike that beaten-down dog that roamed the Pocoran streets—skin and bones and hungry eyes, all gone slack from hunger—though Barney's starvation was emotional rather than physical. 

I heard M Scott Peck's words echoing in my head: "We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived." I'd not understood this when I'd treated the sick dog's condition as a problem to be solved rather than letting the mystery of life play itself out at the animal's expense. Why did this have to be so hard? I wondered. At what point had the mystery gone out of Barney's life, and how in the world could I get mine back? 

I certainly didn't want to end up carrying around as much pain as Barney did but it sure felt as if that's where I was heading if I couldn't get a handle on myself. "Problems do not go away," Peck wrote. "The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers." 

Could it really be that I was experiencing some of the most splendid moments of my life? What a strange concept that seemed given the confusion that reigned inside my head and my heart! I was riddled with unhappiness and was lugging a heavy load of grief from feeling so unfulfilled. The idea that, in hindsight, this discomfort would shine a light on my finest hours seemed far-fetched and foreign to me.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

This is a participating post in #LetsBlogOff. To see other bright minds exploring the question "What are you carrying? [Everybody goes through life and picks up stuff as he or she goes. It's pretty much part of what makes us, us. But what is this stuff? Or in the terms of this week's Blog Off, what are you carrying? Is it cherished mementos from your life and times or is it the scars and hurts of disappointment and missed goals? All of us carry with ourselves the trappings and scraps of the lives we've led.]" click here for the full list of #LetsBlogOff superstars!

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See Her Way Into Daylight

My writing was beginning to come back to me as I marked time in the sweltering heat of a Costa Rican summer. I had been making notes about the sky in Panama City Beach during the raucous Memorial Day weekend trip, and I decided to try to work them into a piece of narrative one afternoon while Jim went to the hardware store to get supplies. He climbed into a rickety truck he'd borrowed from one of the villagers named Donald because the old F-150 had been totaled by one of the priests—no surprise there, as driving had never been a strong suit of the clergy in Costa Rica. 

We'd been mostly catching rides from people as we traveled between towns, and more times than not we suffered through vehicles like Donald's. I wasn't a car snob by any stretch of the imagination—the ugly brown-gold Vega I had in high school proof that I'd drive anything—but I did feel that penny-wise/pound-foolish treatment of a piece of transportation was just plain silly (Okay, I know that love affairs between guys and their cars are legendary but this is an altogether different subject!). If a vehicle was meant for getting one from point A to point B, shouldn't it do so in a modicum of comfort and dependability regardless of its appearance? Apparently not in life according to Donald, who had recently had his truck repainted—a bright red color with a giant yellow and black zigzagging stripe taking over its body so grandly that the paintjob screamed, "My next life will be lived in Las Vegas!" In order to afford the makeover, he'd ignored the lack of padding in the seats, which meant the body took a beating careening along the bumpy roads. He had also ignored the engine that coughed and the clutch that stuck so unmercifully that the stick shift beneath the floorboard must have been worn down to the thickness of a swizzle stick. We were basically riding along in a very pretty tin can with a passenger-side door that would only open from the inside, and a driver's side window that would not roll down. I suppose it won't surprise you that he was gushingly proud of his ride!

As I contemplated what to do with my writing, the only other person around was a local laborer Jim had hired who spoke only Spanish. He had a bitter expression stamped on his face that made me slightly afraid of him so I ignored him as I massaged the material, hoping he would give me the same courtesy. Staring at the page with my scrawling handwriting on it, something occurred to me that I should have realized before but had not: I had a tendency toward personification in my writing. The notes I'd made in Panama City Beach were proof: "The sky presents a checkerboard this morning. Sections of dark and light march from the ocean as if a known pattern had been predetermined. Maybe there was a director just offshore, giving each parcel of sky its dancing orders so that the segments would prance and twirl in pretty order. This is the type of day I long to have tucked into my routine—a day when everything feels moist and beautiful; a day when I can sit on the sofa and read, and no one will think ill of me. The ocean knows how to escape the jouncing mental activity of life: she whispers it every day—her breathy foam cascading, the chorus one of dark and light, of wetness, of persistence, of murmuring hypnotic laziness. She sings to me that it's okay. I want to sing back but I have no idea what to say."

As I scratched out words and jotted ideas into the margins of the overly messy sheets of paper, I heard the crunch of tires on gravel. I didn't think much of it until I heard Jim yell, "No!" as forcefully as he could. He jumped out of the truck so quickly I wondered if he'd remembered to put it into park. I followed his angry gaze and saw why he was so upset. The man he'd left laying block was sawing off the rebar that was protruding from the top block at the edge of a window opening. I guess it was the first time the laborer had seen rebar and he didn't realize that if the stabilizing steel wasn't running through the heart of the blocks, a strong earthquake could tumble them like they were children's toys. Jim stood there with his arms akimbo, shaking his head while the man kept on sawing. Since no one within shouting distance spoke Spanish but the laborer, there was no way for Jim to get it across to him that he shouldn't be removing the rebar. Yelling "no," which he understood perfectly, mattered not for whatever reason as the spiteful man defiantly moved his blade rhythmically across the metal, each grating pass causing Jim to wince. 

With the laborer's ineptitude, Jim's mood turned dark so I tried to stay out of his way. I did so that evening by losing myself in revisiting "Mornings at Lakeshore"—the series I'd started and then abandoned. I figured the writing would help me to feel closer to home and maybe—just maybe—at some point would gel into a collection of poems. But even if all I gained were a couple of hours for pleasing explorations, it would have been time well spent.

I sat at the kitchen table of our jungle house, positioning my notebook to catch as much light as I could from the bare bulb hanging from its socket in the ceiling, and remembered home where there was beauty at the edge of a vibrant lake:

                            • Her eyes sparkled yesterday like a satin dress of brilliant blue. She peeked at me from between the rooftops as I climbed the hill, her sunny sheen illuminating                                     everything around her like a dazzling smile. She is dark now, as it is too early for her to show herself. The streetlights twinkle on her surface as if hinting at the                                     glittering eyes she will use to see her way into daylight…

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!

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