The New Project
For the last month, I’ve been putting words to paper every chance I get. The new project is challenging in that it’s not linear and it introduces ideas about how we might move forward individually and collectively.
I promised I’d share this project with you, so here are the first two installments. Enjoy and, of course, share your thoughts.
Prologue
I sat at the front of the bus, eating warm yogurt with a plastic spoon. At the back, Rock music blared from an over-sized boom box. Cool kids gathered round it, all gleaming skin and silky hair. Their limbs stretched across each other — leg on leg, arm on arm — in a tangle of languid bodies. Muscled and tan, they writhed and stretched to a beat I couldn’t hear.
I watched them in the driver’s mirror. They seemed perfect. Natural. As if they had somehow skipped the struggle the rest of us endured. A full two years younger than them, I didn’t listen to Rock, shave my legs, or wear the right kind of perfume. They were a school of brightly colored fish. I was a hermit crab at the edge of the lagoon.
Out the window, the land dropped away from the road. In the valley below, the Rio Grande wound through green fields and cottonwoods beginning to turn. Ahead, vast cliffs rose like God’s castles – red and majestic against a sky deep blue. O’Keefe’s home. Rattlesnakes and cow skulls. Cactus and ants. Cumulus clouds like cotton candy and ridges to stop your breath. The land would kill you if it could.
The bus crawled up the hill bellowing diesel fumes. A car, impatient, passed on a curve and I sucked in my breath. Northern New Mexico: land of enchantment, land of death. In the hour and half since we’d been traveling, I’d counted more than a dozen Descansos. The little crosses marked the passage of souls. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Plastic flowers and shattered liquor bottles to decorate our roads.
I’d lost my father in June. The fact hadn’t sunk into my bones. I couldn’t feel it. Mourn him. Cry at all. Instead, I counted crosses at the sides of roads. The school community had been kind. They’d brought more food than we could possibly eat and left it on the porch – a whole smoked turkey, a roast leg of lamb, casseroles galore.
Now September and the start of a new school year, the kids pretty much ignored me and teachers left me alone. I went through the motions, did what I had always done, but I was numb.
The land leveled. Rock striations in yellow, white, and red jutted from the plain, made mesas like paper cut-outs against the horizon. The bus shuddered. A teacher groaned. A foul odor made my stomach turn. Red-faced and laughing, a boy denied responsibility for the aroma. Someone opened a bag of Doritos. I wanted someone to open a door.
At the campground, we pitched tents, laid out sleeping bags, and unpacked food. Kids were sent to gather wood. Alone, I wandered about, eavesdropping on conversations like a ghost. Darkness rose. A hand clapped my shoulder and I looked up to see a teacher I hardly knew. He pointed toward the cliffs and asked me to come along. Surprised, and not a little grateful, I trotted behind the small group he’d collected up a narrow trail. Pinon and juniper trees delineated the path, but his flashlight bobbed on the ground – a bright spot in the twilight illuminating rocks and weeds that would snag our toes. After a short climb, he flicked it off and gestured. In front of us, a sandstone amphitheater carved by millennia gaped wide and inviting. Above it, the last vestiges of sunset glowed.
He said nothing. Instead, he began to sing. His voice, low and mellifluous, rose like the dark into the sky. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me…”
One by one, the kids joined him, their voices a chorus of angels. As they sang, the amphitheater caught their notes, built upon them, echoed them back so the air was alive and tingling. The harmony caught me, hooked me, pulled open something stuck and my tears spilled. I didn’t know the words, but as they sang I hummed.
As the sky lost its color, the last notes faded. We stood, silent and awed. My wet cheeks stung. In silence, we headed back to camp. As we descended, sounds of laughter and cooking broke the spell. Campfires dotted the darkness. Someone yelled.
Thirty-five years later, that moment still gives me chills. What made that teacher do what he did? Why did he tap me to go along? I hadn’t taken a class with him yet and wasn’t one of the chorus kids. Thinking back, thinking it over, I believe his invitation was simply a gift. He will never know what he did. I never told him, never revealed my tears or the fact that until that moment I hadn’t been able to shed them. That man was the first to teach me that Amazing Grace is more than a song. It is a state. It is an experience. It is an act of love.
One
It was my birthday weekend. We’d gone camping and the trip had gone wrong. I poked the fire and glanced at him. He slept with a half-full glass of whiskey tilted precariously in his hand. Firelight flickered across his face, highlighting day-old stubble and age and I wanted desperately to wake him up, shake him up, and start all over again. Then I realized he would never change.
Perhaps the campfire conjured spirits. Perhaps the moon was to blame, but something happened on that late May night. The epiphany came in waves. He loves me. Sip of whiskey. He’s trying. Add another log. You can’t make him something he’s not. What if you’re the one who’s wrong?
The lake spread like silver fingers across a dark land. The wind rose, sending a shower of leaves to the ground. I set my whiskey down, pushed the hair off my face, and let loose the tears I’d been holding too long. Amazing Grace – that moment where you give up or give in – is the crossroads, the dangling fate, the beginning or end.
The song was written by a man named John Newton in the eighteenth century. A slaver, Newton had little religious conviction until a storm at sea nearly cost him his life. That night, he called out for mercy. Ten years later, he gave up his profession to study theology and write songs. Amazing Grace speaks to his redemption, promises salvation regardless of sin, offers forgiveness for those who have wronged.
My marriage was at the soul level. No vows could do justice to the depth of my love. No words could define the breadth of it. Steve was my-end-all be-all-everything-all-the-time-oh-my-god man and my undying, raging, over the top love was consuming us like the demon product of a Hindu god.
I could never get enough, never let go his hand for too long. He was home and air and nourishment all at once. With him, I belonged
We met through our kids at the YMCA and first we were friends. When the demise of our respective relationships made us both single, fate broke a computer and let us bump into each other again. In the thirteen years since, we’d been through a lot. Still, as I fed the campfire and listened to him snore, I understood we were, like Newton, adrift in a storm. I cried for mercy, cried for the storm to stop, cried for the love that was killing us both and the lover I might have lost.
He stirred, almost spilt his cup. I pulled it from his fingers and set it down without waking him up. I wanted to stroke his hair, climb into his lap, snap him, me, us, out of it.
The epiphany sang.
He loves you. He’s trying. You can’t make him something he’s not. What if you’re the one who’s wrong?
I didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to own it, and didn’t want to change. The night wore on. The moon rose. The fire cackled like a vicious witch and I swallowed hard. All the fights through all our years boiled down to one damned thing. What I needed from him he couldn’t give me and what did that mean?
In her fabulous book, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution, Laurie Penny says of women, “We are the ones for whom biology is not just destiny: it is catastrophe.” She is speaking of patriarchy, rigged systems, and the systemic oppression and abuse that keep women worldwide in a constant state of vulnerability and flux. Through these we learn to accept and express toxic love.
When I was ten, my father tried to teach me to sing. At his command, I stood next to the piano in our living room. He played a few bars of My Funny Valentine and said, “Sing it.” I nodded and began. Only a few lines in, he stopped me. “No. Not like that. Sing it like you.” I didn’t know what he meant. I tried again. He got frustrated and left.
It took me years to understand that his push for my authentic voice was at odds with his push for my conformance to his ideals. His lesson lingered. At the campfire that night, I heard it again.
I was taught to be a perfect chimera of what woman should and could be – a wolf in a sheep’s body, a pig with the heart of a bull.
When I first met Steve, I was autonomous, but as my love for him grew, so did my need of him. As my need grew, so did my fear of losing him. I gave up my garden to hold his hand. I emptied myself to make room for his goals, hoping our fusion would keep me whole. The trade sucked life from us both.
A log popped. An ember burst free, flared for a minute, and went out. I sipped my drink, savoring its heat. If he couldn’t give me what I needed did that mean we were done? I watched him sleep, watched the light play in the little bit of drool at the corner of his mouth, watched his chest rise and fall, rise and fall.
He loves you. He’s trying. You can’t make him something he’s not. What if you’re the one who’s wrong?
I matched my breath to his, imagined the beating of his heart, and felt my own slowing, calming, steadying. I heard a voice in my head. It said, “You can’t control what you get. You can only control what you give.”
