Honey, I’m Here For The Ride

A magnificent storm came in the night. Rain drummed on the deck and lashed the windows, and the sky broke open with lightning. I climbed out of bed, opened the door, felt drops on my face, and smelled the sweet grassy fragrance of the earth. Sometimes in the morning, I walk into the fog, as I did today. It’s the California version of a snowfall, with all the edges softened and whiteness all around. And yesterday, when I drove to Santa Barbara, the ocean as I viewed it from Highway 101 was an endless, glaring expanse of silvery white light merging with the sky, so bright I could hardly look at it.

Borders are dissolving, solid things are blurring, I am suspended in uncertainty, disoriented and at the same time soothed, for within the uncertainty is every possibility, and there is so much beauty here, even when I cannot see it clearly.

But I am on the constant cusp of tears, and I cannot explain it, but I think it is a response to trauma, and an increasingly acute awareness of the precious and precarious nature of things. 

Sometimes in the night, when I cannot sleep (which is often) I wander in my mind through the rooms of the house that we have vacated, or along the leafy path by the creek, and I wonder if the turtles are in the pond, and if the bobcat is skulking around, and I can almost smell the oranges that will have fallen to the ground. But my nighttime meanderings go further back than that. I can see the rooms of the railroad flat on Coney Island Avenue and the brick house on Long Island that long ago burned to the ground, and I remember how my father painted flowers on the walls, and graceful leafy motifs, and once, a peacock, but also once, a clown. I recall the fights and the tears, but mostly now the love, and I try to suppress my many regrets, but also resolve to turn them into reasons to be better.

And because of the news, or what we know these days as “news” I remembered a school trip to the United Nations, and how awed I was upon entering that space, and the green-black shiny marble facade above the podium where dignitaries gathered. (We lived in Brooklyn, and a field trip like that was not as elaborate as it sounds.) Eleanor Roosevelt was still alive then, so I’m guessing it was 1961, and I was in 5th grade; I was an earnest, idealistic girl, and she was one of my heroes. I had some awareness of the declaration of human rights and the idea of the UN seemed worthy and good. World War II had so recently ended, and the history was real to us. (I remember the tailor in our neighborhood, and the blue numbers tattooed on his skin.) Visiting the UN with my classmates was like entering a sacred place, and we approached with real reverence, not silly kids but, briefly, quiet pilgrims.

Of course, I’ve experienced my share of disillusionment since then, and I understand that some of what we learned in our social studies classes was not entirely true, but somehow, a deep thread of idealism, aspiration, and hope took root in me, and it has not disintegrated, even now. And so I was nauseated, ashamed, and heartbroken to witness the delusional, self-indulgent ranting before the assembly and the world last week by the person who represents our nation as President. (Now, he has declared war on Portland, Oregon. It feels absurd even to say this.) Why is he given such power? Shame on the court, same on the Republicans, shame on those who enable this. When will this nightmare finally turn around? I hope the excesses are at least bringing us closer to a tipping point.

That’s what looms about us constantly, and it isn’t easy to be normal. We all need breaks and we all need laughter, but it isn’t possible to tune this out completely, and we’re still learning how to cope and push back while concurrently functioning and living our own private lives.

This will be our last night in the studio apartment we’ve been renting. Tomorrow the movers will bring our boxes from a storage unit to our new house, and the next chapter begins. The house right now is a box of empty rooms with blank white walls, and does not yet feel like ours. But views of the mountains already bring me comfort.

Our friend Geoff read this perfect poem for us (by Baxter Black) at dinner last week:

A TIME TO STAY, A TIME TO GO

Ya know, I got this ranch from my daddy

He come here in seventeen.

He carved this place outta muscle and blood.

His own and his ol’ percheorn’ team.

I took over in fifty

And married my darlin’ in May.

Together we weathered whatever came up

She had what it took to stay.

Last winter we finally decided

We’d pack up and leave in the spring.

The kids are all grown and ‘city-folk’ now;

We never raised ‘em to cling.

Oh sure, I wished they’d have wanted

To ranch and carry it on

But they did their part, I thank’em for that

And they chose. Now all of ‘em’s gone.

The last thirty odd years we’ve collected

An amazing number of things:

Bonnets and bottles, clippings and letters

And Dad’s ol’ surcingle rings.

We’ve spent the winter months sorting.

Our hearts would ache or would jump

As we looked at our lives in trinkets we’d saved

Then boxed up or took to the dump.

We cried sometimes in the attic

I’m not ashamed of the truth.

I love this ol’ ranch that we’re leavin’

We gave it the strength of our youth.

I love this ol’ woman beside me

She held me and stayed by my side.

When I told her I’s thinkin’ ‘bout sellin’

She said, “Honey, I’m here for the ride.”

These new fellers movin’ in Monday

Are nice and I wish ‘em good luck.

But I’d rather be gone, so Ma, get yer stuff

I’ve already gassed up the truck.

Lookin’ back over my shoulder

At the mailbox I guess that I know

There’s a time to be stayin’, a time to be goin’

And I reckon it’s time that we go.

Yes, it was time that we go. And so we went.

Now the work begins of sculpting a different kind of life in this, our near-the-end phase.

(Honey, I’m here for the ride.)