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 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, but 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.

I am also on the constant cusp of tears. I think it’s a response to trauma, along with 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 familiar brick house on Long Island, long ago destroyed by fire. I think about my father painting flowers on the walls, and graceful leafy motifs, and once, a peacock, but also once, a circus clown, grinning above the bookcase in the room where my brother taught me how to read. I recall the fights and the tears inside those childhood houses, 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 no doubt prompted by the news, or what we know these days as “news, I recalled a school trip to the United Nations headquarters, and how awed I was upon entering that space, and the green-black shiny marble facade above the podium where dignitaries spoke. (We lived in Brooklyn, and a field trip like this to Manhattan 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 ended fewer than twenty years earlier, many of our fathers had served, and the history was real to us. (I remember the neighborhood tailor and his wife in their small sunlit shop, leaning over their work, the blue numbers tattooed on their 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. And every day there’s a new affront.) Why is he given such power? Shame on the court, shame 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. It’s the source of the trauma I referred to earlier, a collective kind of trauma and poison—cruel, vindictive, and bizarre—to which we are subjected daily. We need breaks and we need laughter, but it affects us all in so many ways, and it isn’t possible to tune it out completely, nor should we try. We’re still learning how to cope and push back while concurrently functioning and living our own private lives. But the learning IS taking place, and resistance is growing, and, please do not despair: we will prevail.

Meanwhile, in the midst of this upheaval, Monte and I have sold our beloved ranch home and moved away, jumping off that ledge, leaving the place that demanded so much of us but also steadied, inspired, and defined us. It’s no wonder that I wander there in my head each night, tracing the steps of thirty years. But it was time to go, and tonight will be our last night in the transitional 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 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.