She Is Anyway

We went to a garden center yesterday to buy plants. The friends in whose house we have been staying are abroad, and the plants they have out front are mostly dead and desiccated, with a few vacant pots we look forward to filling. Monte pulled the weeds that were spouting between the paver bricks, and he said it was an easy and satisfying task. We chose bright yellow pansies, blue delphinium, a violet-hued variety of geranium. It’s a way of saying thank you and welcome when they return. 

This street has grown familiar, and the short walk to our daughter’s house, or to the little market on the busy Cowley Road, or a bit further to the center of Oxford, with its historic buildings and the river and shops. There’s a steady clip of cyclists going by: moms with children, older ladies doing errands and hauling groceries, young people nonchalantly gliding along, fit and capable, at their shining best but not knowing it.

I cross the streets carefully, still uncertain which direction to look, making sure to be at crosswalks, and vehicles politely stop for me. I wonder sometimes if I look as befuddled as I often feel, and this thought  immediately conjures up a picture of my mother, another walker from way back. She was always so grateful when people were nice to her, so surprised when the world worked in a way that was parallel to her needs.

I think of my mother a lot lately, as my hair has grown silver and my own physical resemblance to her asserts itself, and I see the vestiges of her personality in a certain endearing silliness I seem to possess. Sometimes when I am with Felix, what comes back to me is not the way I mothered Miranda, but the way she was with me in the earliest days: a rhythmic thumping on the back, an old song, and oh, the absurdly nervous protectiveness.

She would cry out, “Don’t run! You’ll fall down!” And inevitably we did run, and we did fall down. She yelled at us then, for we had defied her and challenged the meanness of reality, for which we were no match, and she knew it. “God punished you,” she would say.

But I understand it now. All that fear was a form of love. The world had not been predictable or gentle with her, and she desperately wanted to keep us safe, accidentally becoming the cause of many of our fears and neuroses.

“I was always a scaredy cat,” she told me once.

And so was I. (Although I am thinking of trying once more to learn to swim, but that’s a story for another time.) I’m a scaredy cat, that’s for sure, but I’ve also been brave in my life. Brave and lucky, both were necessary.

I wish the world had been kinder to the people I have loved, and I wish I too had been kinder, but the only way to assimilate this, to find meaning and absolution, is to remember that the saga is ongoing, not limited to what we can see and understand, and extending beyond our individual life spans.

“You’re doing it again,” Monte tells me, by which he means the ritualistic mea culpa in which I just indulged.

“You go there again and again,” he says.

And I do. Because it’s where and who I am.

But on Saturday, sunshine broke through fog, and my daughter’s neighborhood had a “Penny Lane” kind of feel. Remember that old Beatles song? And though she feels as if she's in a play, she is anyway.

There’s an old-fashioned hardware store at the corner, a little grocery and butcher run by a soft spoken man from someplace faraway, the always busy local pub, and a wonderful coffee place whose roasting beans fill the air with a rich toasty aroma. On this particular morning, Monte was with Felix at the playground, and Miranda and I went to the Oxfam Superstore, which was fun, and Xander was preparing a fabulous brunch of poached eggs Florentine or some amazing thing that smelled of butter and Hollandaise sauce, and there were people from so many different parts of the world walking dogs and holding the hands of their children, and in this moment all was well.

I know there is plenty of reason to think otherwise, but I’m letting myself be contented today. This is who I am also.  

The clouds have been magnificent. Felix waves to the bin guys and the lorry drivers and everyone that passes, and Monte took him to look at the trains. I have watched my daughter swimming, and she looks confident and strong. Whatever transpired has led to this and this will lead to whatever transpires. And though she feels as if she's in a play, she is anyway.