The Heart's Slow Learning

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom." Annie Dillard

Nothing matters but who loves you and how well they perform in this. My father, the first of all my teachers, wrote those words to me in a letter long ago. They seem to be the answer to a question I will ultimately ask, but at the time I read them as a reprimand. I was hiding from him then, from his sad eyes and great disappointment, from his ominous warnings and the heaviness of his own accumulated nevers and regrets.

The clock is ticking he would say, the clock is ticking. But the ticking of the clock was irrelevant to me, for I was twenty-five and still immortal. Even if life was some kind of race, I figured I could enter it later and catch up.

My father lived his entire life on the East Coast except for a South American adventure in the 1930s, and his brief wartime assignment at Camp Cooke. Years later, he spoke wistfully of Santa Barbara, recalling a beauty that seemed almost mythical to him. He always wished he could return someday under different circumstances, but of course he never did. Maybe by living here now I am fulfilling his dream by proxy. I like looking at parts of the landscape that have remained unchanged, seeing what he may have seen. But try as I might, I can’t really imagine him here. He’d be too happy.

A memory comes to me of a winter day I spent with him in Manhattan once. How is it that I had him to myself? There’s noise and traffic, gray sky, gray buildings, marble steps, and an imposing façade, maybe a bank. He buys a small paper bag of hot steamed chestnuts from a vendor on the street and I hold the bag up close to my face and feel its warmth. I am a gap-toothed girl in a red and white striped scarf and a blue coat missing two buttons. My ears are cold, my nose is running, and there’s a sense, as always, of worry and hurry. But the chestnuts beneath their hard brown skins are buttery and satisfying, and I’m here with my father, safe and loved. I wish we didn’t have to go home, where this glorious day will end in a fight, where the best in him will be misunderstood, where all the turning points will take us in circles and the patterns will repeat themselves into hopelessness. I’m carrying a patent leather purse that holds a lucky green rabbit’s foot. My fingers travel through the fur of the rabbit’s foot, touching its tiny sharp nails.

The clock was ticking. His letters always appear to have been written in haste, his penmanship boldly abstracted, devoid of curves, clear and outspoken. Now he’s been dead for nearly thirty-five years, and I read his words, their impact unexpired, parsing his proclamations like scripture.

What matters, he said, is not only who loves you, but how well they perform in this, implying measurement and accountability, and with it, the possibility of falling short. I no longer have the excuse of being young.

______

There is a tray of butterfly wings arranged under glass on a cabinet in my house. The wings are yellow and iridescent blue, positioned in an ornate pattern and bordered by a frame of inlaid parquetry. The young man who would become my father bought that tray in South America, carefully storing it on the ship on which he worked as a cook to pay his passage, carrying it home across the city, and setting it atop a bureau drawer in a Brooklyn railroad flat. As a girl, I stood on a stool and looked in wonderment at the luminous wings of things once living, treasured proof of a long-ago journey...and of my father’s wandering spirit, secret and suppressed, and a life he had before me. Eventually the tray was stashed in the attic and forgotten.

Many years later I discovered and claimed it, and I brought it here where I see it every day, its colors going gold with time and sunlight.

Now I try to find some calculus of meaning, beginning with my father's formula, factoring in loss, subtracting irrevocable mistakes, values increased by the chance of doing better. Sometimes I think I am learning too slowly; everything's spinning so fast.

In the nights I listen to the clock’s conspicuous ticking and the humming of the house beneath all sound.