Turning Points

A teacher told me that all writing begins in the physical world, in concrete nouns and tangible things.  I shall start, then, by telling you that the sea looks slate gray this morning, and a white sky has smudged the outline of Santa Rosa Island, and the radio on the kitchen counter is playing Morning Edition with its crisp talk of ongoing protests and oppression in Iran, foiled airplane bombings, and a lighten-up piece on misremembering Shakespeare.

There is a mug of strong coffee at my elbow, a slice of pumpkin pie on a white plate, and a bowl of fruit illuminated by the sun at the center of a plain wood table. Everything has its own import, its own gravity, its own shine; the moment gleams. But the moment also belongs to a year that is drawing quickly to a close. I can almost feel the whoosh in my ear as it rushes by to take its place in the past.

In a few weeks I will bump up against the anniversary date of the loss of someone I loved very dearly. The last time we really talked was on New Year’s Day, 2000. I had been bedridden with the worst flu I’d ever had, and I woke up intermittently to glimpses on a television screen of what seemed a surreal series of ceremonial dances and celebrations marking the start of the new millennium as it crawled from East to West across the planet.

When this person I loved called me, though, I was feeling a great deal better, and I sat in the window seat of the bedroom with the phone in my hand. I remember laughing with her about all the extravagant pomp and anxiety that had accompanied this particular turning of the digits, and chatting about Frank McCourt’s newest book (which was ‘Tis), and then waxing nostalgic about things we both remembered from long ago days, things no one else would understand.

Oh, we laughed a lot in the course of this conversation, and we felt especially close to one another. And maybe the residue of illness had sensitized me, or maybe it was just the advent of a new year, but it felt as though we were at some sort of a turning point and I suddenly realized with new clarity how much this person meant to me. (I am certain she was feeling the same way about me.)

I never imagined, of course, that three weeks later she would be gone. The details wouldrequire me to tell a long, sad story that I do not care to write about, a story of misunderstanding and missed opportunity, of biology’s blindness to fairness and sense, of the profundity and complexity of an emotional inheritance that may not be apparent until a harsh wind blows it clear.

I know. None of that made any sense. I am violating the teacher’s admonition to write with nouns and not abstractions. But here is the reality, still intangible but plain as I can put it: I am haunted by the knowledge that I might have done something to help this person that I loved, and I didn’t do anything. Or what I did was wrong and clumsy and too late.

Intellectually I realize I do not own all of the responsibility, and maybe even none of it. It is a complicated tale that can be viewed from many angles. I take it on nonetheless. I sometimes think I am hauling around about 90% of the blame to this very day, and that’s enough to keep me pressed down deep in the mud, and I suppose that explains a lot about me.

This is old news, something I have been living with for ten years, but the advent of a new year approaching, and in particular, a new numerical decade, has brought it up more starkly. Now I am wondering if I can will myself to finally release some of this self-flagellation. I’m so tired of it.

I have a feeling, in fact, that this person I loved would be very annoyed at me for having wasted so much precious time looking back remorsefully at things that cannot be changed. So I am going to try to let some of this useless guilt go, and I’m not going to label it a "resolution", but deem it an effort, a conscious, sincere, and deliberate effort.

Because decades fly by; I see that now.

That was a hard January, I’ll tell you that. A neighbor of ours also died that same month, a suicide. In fact, just this past weekend we went to visit his parents, Ralph and Oralee. It’s an annual holiday tradition, and I’m glad we do it. They are lovely people who, having no other children or grandchildren, have chosen to donate their assets to environmental causes such as conserving open space, a beautiful and enduring legacy.

I’m thinking about this couple now because we were so recently with them, sitting in a great room filled with sunlit nouns: bookshelves and paintings, an ivory-colored carpet, a table set with sprigs of yellow freesias, embroidered white place mats, gold-trimmed china, windows looking out onto a garden and a golf course. Music was playing — background music, the elevator kind — and after lunch I had a sleepy feeling as I sat listening to this music and snippets of conversation I could not quite snag into, a little like a child at the grown-ups’ table waiting to be excused.

But at one point Ralph started reminiscing about his surfing days in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s in Southern California; we’d brought over a book of photos from those days, and he is in one of the pictures, and we asked if he would sign it for us. He is an elegant man with a thick shock of white hair, but he seemed smaller and more fragile than he had even a year ago. Trained as a fighter pilot during World War II, he expressed embarrassment at the way his hand trembled when he signed his name.

Once, during another visit, he said, “I thought I would never be old. And look at me. I’m old.”

I think there must be a sense of surprise in all of us when we discover that we are old. It is only lately that I understand how fast it comes upon us, and I imagine that we remain our same essential selves but peer out from elderly faces we can hardly recognize as our own.

Decades fly by; I see that now.

I try to keep writing. I am rereading Rilke’s Letters to A Young Poet. He says this to those who would write:

Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose…rescue yourself from general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty — describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches…

All these Things around us! Given the compulsion to write, there’s no shortage of material, and I don’t know that I am enough of a poet to summon up the riches,,but I can certainly see that my everyday life is far from poor. (The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world, as Wallace Stevens famously said.)

My head is teeming with images and my heart is spilling over with its sorrow and love, and another year is drawing to a close —mere minutes, it seems, after starting— and I want to hold it for an instant, write it down, because it all meant something...but what?

The decades fly by as we spin through time and space, always at a turning point.