Leaving At A Ferocious Rate
A fellow alumnus of the Long Island high school from which I graduated in 1968 has made it his mission to colorize senior portraits and post various yearbook photos on Facebook. I’m at a loss to explain his motivation, but the result is a cavalcade of teen faces from long ago, hair teased and bee-hived or Brylcreem-ed and duck-tailed, expressions solemn, complexions smoothly retouched, tinted as if by the magic wand of a mortuary cosmetologist. With surprising frequency, a portrait is accompanied by information about the subject’s death, may they rest in peace. One such post was followed by this comment: “We are leaving this world at a ferocious rate!”
I like that adjective, “ferocious” …it implies that we are not going gently, even if the exits have been numerous and swift. I look at my own frozen image as a graduating senior in the Class of ‘68 and see an unsmiling girl with dark hair and intense eyes. She is a stranger to me. I cannot fathom the tunnel of time and distance that has ensued since those ancient days, the many selves that I have been, the providence that has landed me in this particular here and now. But the pace of the ride seems to have accelerated, and I’m trying to get the meaning and do what must be done.
We spent a few days with our friends Barbara and Andy last week in a rented condo in San Diego County. Barbara is someone I met in the decade after high school, the bleak 1970s of upstate New York, when we rented rooms in an old brownstone building in Albany. I was finally finishing up an undergraduate degree after frequent detours and abandonments, and she was a social worker in a methadone clinic, and we listened to records and went running in the park across the street and helped keep each other sane. I refer to this period as our daze of whine and roaches. (Indeed, if you flicked on the light switch at night, you could see the roaches scurrying about, and sometimes I was certain I could hear them in the darkness, a creepy crunchy sound.)
Some friends are dear for a time and vanish. Barbara and I vanished from each other’s lives, reconnected years later, and became dear to each other once again. In January of 2017 we marched together in Washington, D.C., and it was epic and historical. Now suddenly we’re silver-haired ladies afraid of falling, no longer running but enjoying long walks, and noticing more than we used to. Maybe when all is said and done, a shared sense of humor is what bonds people, and shared values. We have declared that our days in this coastal town would be a brief reprieve from the worries pressing heavily upon us, and we intermittently erupt into ranting, but mostly we manage to be carefree.
Sometimes the pale light and grey ocean remind me of the Long Island I once knew, but the culture is decidedly southern California: surf shops, yoga, drive-thru donuts, flashback vintage, breakfast-lunch-and-tacos, Jesus saves and so do herbal remedies. It’s mellow and vaguely hippie-esque, and it’s easy to imagine all is well, but now and then I’m jolted back to that other reality. Sitting outside a deli, for example, I overhear two women debriefing after a meeting of the local Republican ladies’ organization. It’s disturbing to hear how devotedly they are repeating the lies and applauding the cruelty and senselessness that is unfolding. There they are, sitting in the sunshine, fleshy and self-satisfied, eating their pricey lunches, and parroting MAGA propaganda like the hosts of a morning TV talk show on Fox. He’s just cleaning up all the waste and inefficiency! (We know differently, of course. I have already glimpsed the anguish of good people in the direct lines of fire.)
But there will be time to act. This has been a space for replenishment. One day, we went to the Self-Realization Fellowship Meditation Gardens, a serene and lovely place to wander on paths lined with ferns, palms, cacti, and colorful flowers, and contemplate koi ponds and ocean views. We were gently chided once for too noisily marveling at the splashy antics of huge koi in a pond, but mostly we felt a quiet sense of wonder. There were other pilgrims present. Some sat on benches meditating, others just peacefully strolled, a little girl in a summer dress frolicked by a fountain, and the world was a benevolent place.
We encountered a woman taking a picture of her elderly parents, and I offered to take one of the three of them. We felt a spontaneous fondness for this trio, and it was mutual, and we took each other’s pictures in multiple configurations, including all seven of us in selfies. It made no sense, but they were beautiful and kind, and I noticed how tenderly the man placed his hand on his wife’s arm as they posed, and she took off her hat and revealed white hair and sparkly earrings, and they apologized for not speaking good English, and we asked where they were from and never got the answer, but it didn’t matter a bit. It was as though we had found family, an Asian branch we hadn’t known about, and we’ll never see them again, but the pictures show us smiling on a bluff above the sea, and maybe it was some kind of self-realization magic, but I am certain we all felt it. As we said good-bye, the white-haired woman gently took my hand as though to steady me, and I sensed the presence of my own mother, and of all mothers. I felt mothered somehow, and I remembered that we need to mother one another. (A form of self-realization, perhaps?)
Later, on the train ride home, while idly tapping my phone, just poking around for poetry, as I often do, I came across a poem by Langston Hughes called I Look At the World. It was written from the perspective of “awakening eyes in a black face” but I think it is applicable to awakening eyes in a face of any color:
I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that's in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.
I like that verse because there’s an urgency to it, a self-realization, a sense of power, and a clarity of vision.
Back home now, the canyons are green and misty, the week ahead is dotted with plans for good trouble, and my heart is bursting with gratitude and wonder. But let us hurry. We are leaving this world at a ferocious rate.