Still Amazed

Random Detour

 

Notice there's been nothing going on at this blog lately? My mind has taken a break. I am in receive-input mode, with no signs of emerging anytime soon. I am reading, living, absorbing experience, but I don't seem to be processing it into anything meaningful or creative. No output. 

But this morning as part of my intake, I was reading the blog my daughter Miranda writes, and lo and behold, in a post called "Flashback" I saw a mention of me. Well, actually it referred to  "my mom", but I know I am the mom she means, and I've been tagged. I am supposed to choose the tenth photo in my "first" folder of photos, post it, and write about it, and I figured that's not a bad idea for getting jump-started when you're dormant, blank, and blah. 

Naturally I wasn't sure what my "first folder" of photos was, since my i-Photo files are all in a jumble, but the first coherent folder in the line-up happened to be something called "East Coast trip" and I decided that was as good as any; even if it was not literally the very first folder I ever put together, it is from about seven years ago, which seems like another era. What you see above is the tenth image the folder contained. It's not a particularly good one, but let that be proof that I played fair and selected what happened to be there. 

The picture was taken in Philadelphia during the time when Monte and I were traveling with Miranda to look at colleges. I don't think she ever seriously considered Philadelphia as one of her choices; mostly we went to visit the fellow with the red hair and little round eyeglasses in the far left of the picture: Scott Wagner. He had been Miranda's violin teacher in Santa Barbara, and not only was he a wonderful musician, he was also funny and exuberant and playful. I remember waiting sometimes for lessons to be over, and I'd hear not just strains of music, but giggles and talk of books or interesting places to visit. Scott knew that music required discipline and practice, but he saw no reason to take the joy out of it. Along with music, he served up enthusiasm and delight. Miranda loved him. 

So in addition to our Boston and New York itineraries, there was a train trip to Philadelphia that winter. Scott lived in an old brownstone house downtown; a narrow arched window looked out onto the church across the street, and there was a clay pot of miniature daffodils on the sill. A Curtis Institute graduate, Scott was part of Philadelphia's chamber orchestra and played viola for the opera company. One night we went with him to the opera and then on to a restaurant with a group of young singers who sang at the table, their voices astonishing, and the more wine they drank, the more they sang. Afterwards, we walked home across a park filled with moonlight and snow. 

And I mean snow! The East coast was getting plenty of it that winter. There we are the next day, still filled with child-like wonder and surprise, stomping around in our floppy winter clothes, crunching through that nice crusty top layer and leaving deep footprints. It's that bright, blue-sky, unequivocal kind of cold, and our cheeks almost sting, but we're being silly and having fun. Monte is wearing his familiar black cap, smiling broadly.

And that young girl with the long dark hair and the red and yellow scarf and oversized bag filled with books? She is on the cusp of leaving us. She is scouting out the possibilities, confirming her desire to try living life elsewhere, testing the waters, testing the snow. 

I could never have imagined how soon this would all seem long ago.

 

Sustaining Things

The days have been rushing by too quickly and I’ve been immersed in their events. So I’m playing a bit of catch-up with this blog post, although I have started to think about bailing on blogging altogether. I can’t quite decide, you see, whether the blog helps me to keep writing or whether it has begun to substitute for more substantial writing. I wonder if other blogger-writer types have this question.

 

In the meantime, a scroll through the calendar and my notebook brings up first our 25^th anniversary getaway to Yosemite on October 20. Yosemite is still there, thank God, and words like magnificent and breathtaking still apply, but as others have pointed out, it is perhaps loved too well and used too hard. It’s a delicate compromise, I know, that elusive balance between preserving nature and enjoying nature, but it’s unsettling to see the complexity of infrastructure at this park: a jangling jumble of buildings, campgrounds, concessions, parking lots, signs, and tour buses gives the place a decidedly busy and suburban look, and, even in midweek and off-season, we were surprised at the traffic and the numbers of people we encountered. The crowds thin out, of course, if one walks further and takes on the more challenging or less popular trails. Another strategy, which my intrepid friend Bob Isaacson advises, is “Just keep looking up.” Which says more about Bob than anything.

Monte and I stayed at the Wawona, a funky Victorian hotel just outside the park, the kind of place that gives you a brass key instead of a plastic card, and there’s a guy named Tom Bopp playing “vintage music” on a grand piano in the lounge, a gig he has apparently held for 26 years. What I liked about the Wawona is that it smelled like the old hotels in the Catskill Mountains that I vaguely remember from the 1950s. I was also charmed by the fact that our dear friend TC had arranged for a bottle of champagne on ice to be waiting in our room when we checked in. It was a fine adventure all in all, perfect for a couple whose flashiness has faded but whose core is still strong. I’ve learned that what deepens love is time and shared history.

A day after we returned, I attended a “renewal” sponsored by the South Coast Writing Project and led by Kim Stafford, a writer, poet, and teacher extraordinaire.  Kim also happens to be the son of the late William Stafford, and anyone who reads this blog knows how frequently I quote and refer to William Stafford. I told Kim his father is like a dear and constant friend whom I have never met, and he said that his father would have understood that and would have probably felt the same way about me -- a sweet and perfect response from a  very gracious man. At one point Kim told a story about the woman of San Nicolas island and how after her 18 years of isolation one of the men hunting her down saw her on a ridge and crept up behind her and touched her shoulder, and of course she crouched in terror, but her very first act thereafter was to offer food; she made a meal of roasted roots and served it. Kim said, "What do you do for another human being? You put before them a sustaining thing. That is the essential, fundamental human gesture." The idea of course being that teaching and writing are things of sustenance as well.  He also talked about the importance of "local" writers, of being a resonant voice in a small place rather than being famous, and he made it clear that this was not a lesser thing. And we wrote. 

Speaking of writing, I’m excited and proud to have been involved in the creation of a new book. It’s called Layers: Composite Photographs from the Lompoc Valley, by Kam Jacoby, with text by me. Kam’s compelling images seem to prove that the past and present coexist and intermingle. If you’re interested in the book, take a look here. 

Finally, a few days ago I received word that my guitar totin’, coffee drinkin’, baseball cap wearin’ ol’ buddy Ted Martinez died. It wasn’t completely unexpected. I wrote about Ted here in May and had been missing him for quite some time already. There’s also a story about Ted on my website, Zacate Canyon, right  here. I don’t know how to explain Ted or why I loved him so much right from the very first day we met. He was  a great soul in humble garb, my encouraging friend and Yaqui Indian guru, and if he came by my classroom, it was a good day, guaranteed. Parts of his life were hard, but he brought a lot of joy to people, and his story was ultimately one of redemption, and that's my favorite kind of tale. 

So I'm just keepin' Ted in my heart and doin' my best, and I'm gonna be a diamond someday.

 

Bejeweled

Twenty-five years ago my mother-in-law gave me a pair of sapphire and diamond earrings. They had belonged to her mother, an elegant lady of Los Angeles, and they are beautiful, although at this point I should admit that my taste in jewelry is not very sophisticated. I am drawn to bright, shiny objects -- baubles, as Monte would say – and I also tend to become fond of things for no real reason other than sentiment and association. But I did not realize how many jewels and trinkets I had accumulated until just last week when (inspired by Monte’s penchant for getting organized and eliminating clutter) I purchased some clear cases with tiny compartments and set about sorting through all my earrings, rings, and necklaces within them. It was a fun mission, the kind of task I would have delegated to my daughter when she was a little girl. In the course of my sorting I managed to get rid of a lot of junk, and everything I kept is now untangled, matched with its mate, and immediately visible. An at-a-glance assessment (which was never before possible) unequivocally confirms that most of what I treasure, jewelry-wise, is cheaply ornamental or cherished primarily due to the story, place, or person associated with it. In any event, I definitely have sufficient decoration and sparkle at hand for the rest of my days. Never did the term “embarrassment of riches” so aptly apply.  

Which brings me back to the sapphire and diamond earrings, the rare item in my collection that probably has some worth in dollars beyond two or three digits. (My husband's grandmother had class and good taste and was apparently a woman of some means.) When my mother-in-law gave the earrings to me, she did so with only one caveat: “Wear them. Please. Don’t wait until you’re an old dowager.”  

And I did wear them. Once. Maybe twice. My mistake was to put them in a safe deposit box, and what’s the likelihood of spontaneously adorning yourself with something that is locked away in a bank vault? Years passed. I forgot about them, of course, because such objects have no intrinsic value or importance; they are valuable only when you wear and enjoy them, and they are important only when...well, they are never actually important. And they cease to exist when you stash them away, except as some sort of unmet potential -- like a missed chance, like a Cinderella slipper that no one picked up. Heaven knows I don’t need any more of those.

Lately I have had a fascinating flurry of contact with old friends I knew in the misty recesses of the 1960s and 1970s and hadn’t talked to since. (Good material for another blog post, perhaps? I’m thinking something along the lines of What Facebook Hath Wrought…) Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me that I am now effortlessly exchanging comments about President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, for example, with people I went to school with during the Vietnam War. It’s been fun, mostly, but it’s also a splash of icy water sometimes.  One minute you’re new and blank and lovely and suddenly all your peers are people with grown kids and grandkids and pensions and golf clubs and houses in Florida and too much history to update you on and all the patina and gravity of age, and it takes you by surprise again and again until you finally sit down with the fact that this is where your generation is -- with you right there among them -- and, as my father used to say, “The clock is ticking” and, as J. Alfred Prufrock used to say, “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker”…

No great revelation here. Only a simple statement of intent: I am going to wear the damned earrings, the sapphire and diamond ones.  I may be headed fast toward my dotage  and dowager-dom, but I can still get in under the wire. I recently released the earrings from their meaningless captivity in the safe deposit box, and I am going to wear them to ride my bicycle today, and I am going to wear them to a reception at a gallery tonight, and I may just hang around the house, bejeweled, in my pajamas sometimes. And after I have sparkled for a bit, I am going to give them to my daughter, and I will tell her to wear them right away.

On October 12

It’s Monday afternoon, a gray and quiet one, except for the sound of the generator I've just turned on, and now it is beginning to rain, not a lot, just a passing wet whisper, darkening the deck, refreshing the chaparral, promising more.  We yearn for rain here and anticipate it with pleasure. We prepare for it, too. Yesterday industrious Monte was already clearing gutters, sealing windows, climbing on the roof checking for leaks. Tomorrow I’ll go into town and buy the things we’ve lately been lacking. I like having the cupboard stocked as we head more deeply into fall. Sometimes after it rains Jeanne and I will put on our rubber boots and go out together to check things out. If we find places on the dirt road where water is pooling, we create little tributaries, digging channels by scraping down the dirt with our boots, and diverting the water into the gully where the creek is. Sometimes, however, we make no pretense at all of being useful and simply jump around in the puddles like overgrown children, and if it's still raining a little, we open our mouths to the sky and taste it.

I am alone today and feeling contemplative. One reason is that this is the day my father died, thirty-one years ago, and although to some it is Columbus Day, for me it's a day of memory and reflection. I’ve written about it many times, maybe more than a person should, and I’ve lived with it more than half my life, but here I am, still looking at it. It was my first great loss, and I guess we get through these experiences but never quite over them. I was in Syracuse when I got that particular wake-up call. The bed I was in faced a double window through which I could see the tops of the maple trees, and their leaves were bright yellow that morning, and I remember wondering at their dissonant and alarming beauty. Then, unable to assimilate the vast fact that had suddenly been delivered to me, I focused on what actions were required. It seemed that I should first call my younger sister, who was attending school in Cortland, just a short drive to the south, and it seemed that I should tell her to be ready and I would pick her up and we would drive home to Long Island together.

It was 1978 and I was a graduate student; my car was low on gas and my purse bereft of cash. Here comes a peculiar, creepy detail I will never forget: The man who was my boyfriend then opened his wallet, pulled out a five and a one, handed them to me and said, “You can add this to the rest of what you owe me.”

Yikes. 

I learned, though, that people reveal themselves most clearly in those quick moments of doing, those flickers of authenticity, be it lovely or disturbing.

And don’t worry. Most of the time, the revelatory moments I glimpse are poignant and lovely, reminding me of the humanity we share.  There are painstaking efforts, and songs sung for no one, and straight brave postures as frailty makes itself known. There's a woman’s wistful glance in the mirror as she wonders where her youth went, an elaborate favor with no return expected, small gallantries and smiles. I am surprised every day by kindness and courage. 

William Stafford (again, and of course) said it well:

"I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen

friends, or times when only a glance

from a passenger beside me, or just the tired

branch of a willow inclining toward earth,

may teach me how to join earth and sky." 

Amen.

And on this day, October 12, I salute my father once again. If I know anything about decency and duty, it’s because he lived his life that way, and if my heart is a place where hope still thrives, it’s because he put a lot of love in there. 

It's hard sometimes for faith to coexist with so many inconsistencies and unanswerable questions, but I think it can and does. And I figure that even if you just put one foot in front of the other, eventually you are on some sort of journey. There are times when searching is almost like finding. 

In the meanwhile, I hope nothing that happens makes you hard or mean. Let's try to be the antidote.

Into a Winter, Long Ago

The harvest moon has risen; it still hasn’t given up on us. And the winds have been howling. My blogging hope today was to look outside only, with no words about myself. (Even the potato has too many I’s.) 

But I guess I can’t quite manage. I’ve been listening to a haunting song called White As Diamonds by a woman named Alela Diane and it is reminding me of my years in the cold north.

Let’s see if I can put in a link to it here: White as Diamonds

Oh, yes, I’ve known mornings white as diamonds, silent from a night so cold. And I've known lives buried in snow, and hearts that were ghosts in dark waters.

I’ve spent my whole life trying not to be that. And I was so tired of winter when I finally left and found my way to California that I vowed, Scarlett O'Hara-like, I would never be cold again.

But sometimes it was beautiful, and this song brings that back to me too.

I remember when the streets were glazed, and glassy ice encased the trees, when you could walk straight across a snowy lake, when even the frosty fog of my breath was suspended in the air unwilling to drift away. One night in particular I stepped outside of a house I was visiting, and the world had gotten cold so suddenly it almost cracked, and now there was a vast waiting hush before me, and everything was shining. I’m not exaggerating, and no, I wasn’t stoned – there were glints of light, sparks and glitter, flecks of diamonds in snow and dark streets, and it was magic, and I knew it.

Fortunately, my friend Steve Gehrig was there, and he told me what was happening because he had known such nights in northern Michigan: it’s a diamond night, he said, simple as that.

Every place has its wonders, I suppose. One of these days I intend to see the Northern Lights, and to accomplish that I am going to have to brace myself for some chill, that’s for sure. In the meantime, there are mornings white with fog here (our version of snow) and the wind is now hinting of our gentle spin on fall.

And On to Bryce Canyon

Today we traveled north and east to Bryce Canyon National Park, and as we drew closer to the entrance to the park a series of signs along Highway 12 urged us to pull over for: Rodeo, Moccasins, Bakery & Fried Chicken, Indian Trading Post, Rock Shop, Horse Riding, Scenic Flights, Laundromat, Car Wash, ATV Tours, Wigwam Camping, General Store with Digital Media, or the chance to Hand Feed Exotic Deer. We found some of these things curious and amusing, but, as we were already well fortified with lemonade, jerky, and granola bars, we were eager to enter the park and explore.

Past the gate we came to a large parking lot that was unexpectedly crowded and busy. One large long-distance transit coach gleamed silver in the sunlight: Dream Tours, it said. Privately owned RVs were parked side by side like relatives from an expansive family who all bore a strong resemblance to each other: big boned, wide hipped cousins with loud voices and a thirst for gas. One of them, whose owner leaned against it, emanated the unmistakable smell of a stogie. There were cars with plates from several states, one as far away as Florida, and people were busily loading and unloading coolers, backpacks, and various kinds of apparel. The parking lot was hopping. We walked with dozens of other folks in groups or couples to an overlook and interpretive center. There were bearded guys with hiking sticks and sturdy boots, amply-fleshed women in pedal-pushers, matched bookend pairs of senior citizens with white hair and sneakers. Friends posed for each other with signs or scenery in the background, and some closely studied the captions at the interpretive center, reading them out loud, pointing things out to others. We heard French and German, and Boston accents. Who were all these people? They seemed to be everywhere. Wasn’t summer over?

“It’s a hell of a place to lose a cow,” Ebenezer Bryce supposedly said of the place, at least according to the blurb on a sign adjacent to a plastic coated picture of him alongside his wife Mary. They were homesteaders, and they looked stern. Ebenezer had already supervised the building in 1868 of the Latter Day Saints church in Pine Valley, said to be the oldest Mormon building in the world. From 1875 to 1880, the couple settled at the mouth of a certain canyon with colorful towers of limestone, digging ditches for irrigation and building roads to carry timber for firewood, fences and a house. Other settlers began using the road and, in the oblivious manner of newcomers indifferent to what might have been happening in the eons before their arrival, took to calling the canyon “Bryce”.

Life couldn’t have been easy. The country is beautiful in an eerie way, but harsh and windy, and depending on the season, uncomfortably hot or miserably cold. We gaze out onto a vast panorama of red rock pinnacles called hoodoos, whipped into shape by weathering and erosion, and twisted pine, and mountains in the hazy distance. The palette is exquisite, with limestone as its base, oxidized into orange and a brick-ish red, with an occasional blue hint of magnesium.

But we’re discouraged by the sheer population and wonder how far we’ll have to walk to get away.

Answer: not far at all. We set out on a clearly marked trail that will take us through an area called “Fairyland” and before you know it, there are just the three of us again, descending into a sun-bleached world so quiet we can hear only the hum of wind and the sound of our footsteps, and by the woodsier wash below “Tower Bridge” a burst of birdsong. Some of the hoodoo structures line up side-by-side like sentries, others resemble the ruins of an ancient temple, and it occurs to me how readily we turn to metaphor to label the world’s mysteries and marvels.

We watch how the light paints warm hues onto the surfaces of stone, how a window in a peach-colored wall presents the sky and a small white cloud, how a tree struck by lightning has been sculpted into swirls like a barber-shop pole, but is charcoal at the edges, and reaches up like a stick of cinder against the blue. We feel that we are in another world, an ancient one.

We get silly, too, taking pictures from all angles, calling each other Ansel, blaming our cheesy cameras for our inability to capture the full wonder of what we are beholding, but knowing it is impossible. I am wearing my l’avventura hat, the black cap I bought in Italy and wore to hike in the mountains above the Amalfi coast. I pause on a hill and lean against a tree and Steve is taking a picture of me saying things like, “Tilt your head back a little. Touch your hat. Chew on your sunglasses.” We’re not very old.

We walk further, and we grow silent, and with every rise and turn there is some new marvel to behold. The air is light and I feel light. I think about good things: the sound of a raven’s wings as one passes overhead, the way sunlight illuminates green leaves, the fact that people do come here, drawn as to a church, but that it doesn’t take much to leave them all behind.

 

 

Into the Red Rock Country

The streets end with the western edge of Zion, but until then it’s a clapboard house kind of neighborhood, with sunflowers, cornfields, and cottonwood trees. Yesterday the mayor of nearby Hurricane proclaimed global warming to be “just so much malarkey” stirred up by environmentalists, and I cannot help but wonder if this is a disturbing indicator of the local political climate. Our friend Steve, who moved here five years ago, doesn’t worry about it. He is an avid cyclist who loves the stunning natural beauty of the area, and he has found good friends here. He skips the Mormon television channels on his television, succumbs to WalMart for necessities, and notes that in general it’s just a neighborly, small-town place. He has to stop at the post office today, and we wait in the car, and it takes a long time because the postmistress is tearful. “I think her husband left her,” says Steve. 

We are going to the Kolobs, and specifically to a finger canyon at the south fork of Taylor Creek, a sandy ravine lined with red cliffs that rise on either side to 1500 feet.  “With every storm,” says the sign, “ephemeral waterfalls from runoff and snowmelt cut back into the sandstone headwall, carving the canyon longer and deeper.” Indeed there is a carved and sculpted look to the place, and the rock is marked by mineral stains and water-etched lines and swirls.

It’s hot, and the trail begins on a decidedly uphill theme, but the walls of sandstone are glowing, and there is the sensation of entering a wonderland. We walk through a dry creek bed, soft with salmon-colored sand, and at one point the trail opens out and we veer left to a meadow and sit there for a while. I watch a swallow soaring near the top of the cliff, echoed by its shadow. Resuming our walk, we marvel at the color and the churned up chiseled rock and Steve points out the rock-climbing eye bolts on an astonishing vertical wall. Sometimes we are surprised by verdant sprigs of tiny trees and grasses growing through cracks in the rock. We encounter no one else, absolutely nobody.

 

Among the Aspens

 

I fell from a rooftop in my dream, but I woke up today in Utah where a blue-sky day stretched out in front of us. We are staying at the house of our friend Steve, who sees the Kolobs from his living room window, and there are many possibilities for exploration, but a short Sunday hike seemed most fitting for a pair of travelers who had driven to Burbank yesterday, flown to Vegas, and then driven here in a rental car with a late stop for dinner in Mesquite.  We headed towards Cedar Breaks, where we paused and said oh, and then we dropped down towards Panguitch, and along the way there was a meadow, and in the meadow, a little forest of aspen and fir trees. We parked in a turnout at the side of the road and meandered through the meadow, each of us choosing a separate course but all eventually ending up in the forest, for it was absolutely necessary that we walk among the trees. 

I wanted at first to photograph a single aspen leaf in mid-air as it danced in its descent, a single leaf against the sky, but it seemed impossible. "A fool's errand," said Steve, and he was probably right. Then a breeze passed through the treetops, shimmying them like tambourines and scattering the leaves into the blue where they fluttered and flickered like translucent gold coins, and instead of trying to capture this elusive spectacle in a photograph, I yielded, wisely, to the wonder of it. We were at some altitude and the air was thin enough that my head was light and my breathing felt like shallow sips. We found a tree upon whose bark someone had carved his initials in 1928. Steve caught a glimpse of a small shy deer. And as if it were not enough to have been showered by heart-shaped yellow leaves, there was the smell of the woods and the alpine air, the smell of earth, and bark, of evergreen and aspen, a fusion of fragrance that I had long forgotten but it felt like welcome home. 

I don’t know how long we wandered around among the trees, but we were in good spirits when we got back to the car. We had satellite radio and discovered a station playing Grateful Dead, all the time, every day. (How is this even possible?) We listened to Box of Rain as we drove past red sandstone spires, then a medley called Help on the Way/Slip Knot/Franklin’s Tower that I had never heard and it went on and on and was really rather wonderful. We passed hills of black volcanic rocks, and two men on horseback with a 3-legged dog herding sheep in a dusty field, and intermittent clusters of flame-colored trees, and at some point we decided we were hungry and we bought a chicken in Cedar City, rotisserie-cooked, and three ears of sweet corn, and went back to Steve’s where the moon rose over the Kolobs and there’s even television and it feels a lot like vacation.  

Mean Streets, Happy Canyon

These were the streets where he liked to hang out,” she said, referring to her son. “Everyone knew him around here."

It was late afternoon, still hot, and Caribbean music spilled out from the Cuban restaurant on the circle. A young Latina in very high heels and a short tight purple dress straddled a motorcycle, arranging her face in sultry expressions as a guy with a big camera and movie director affectations took pictures. A middle-aged couple walked by with a poodle on a leash, a mother with a squirmy little boy sat at an outside table offering him spoonfuls of rice pudding, and a college-aged girl with a pierced nose and a vintage dress exited the Starbucks next door carrying a laptop and a Frappuccino. 

I imagined him in this neighborhood, on his turf, feeling like somebody. He was probably not far from here when he was picked up that last time, on the night of his big mistake. High on meth, past his curfew, and with someone who had gang affiliations…so no one is saying that he was an angel, but the consequences have been terribly harsh, and the emphasis seems to be on punishment rather than rehabilitation. He’s in prison now, and in a sense so is his mother, and I, too, although I was never very close to him, feel a small part of myself barred and shut. 

He was barely sixteen when he first got into trouble, and it seemed to me that his emotional development was snagged right there; he got caught in a cycle that is tough to transcend. 

And if progress is two steps forward and one step back, he was gradually making progress, but this last step back was a pretty bad slip, and the court didn’t show him much sympathy. 

So the kid is in prison, and he just turned twenty in there, and it’s unbelievably depressing. 

People do endure, though. Maybe he’ll be one who gets through and be able to build a better life for himself. I pray.

But this is not the sort of thing that inspires me to write.  

I sometimes wonder what my blog is about anyway. It seems to defy description, other than a generic sharing of experiences, so I suppose the disturbing and unpleasant must be included along with the mundane and the beautiful. Together they make up a life.

We returned late last night to baby cows, as small and sweet as lambs, limbs splaying, fur still damp and downy, and a tiny green frog on the windowsill, almost iridescent. Little things hiding, yellow moon. 

Right now I am packing for a trip to Utah, where time used to live, where another sky waits.

Reclamation

He was mine once, and he completed me. I loved his cheery, unflappable demeanor, his unblinking gaze, the mouth that never ceased to smile. There was pink in his cheeks, a perkiness to his little black nose, and dignity in his widow’s peak, even if his hairline was a bit high. The four-fingered yellow-gloved hands hanging passively by his side were forever empty and unclenched, and he held his arms in a way that suggested a willingness to be hugged. He was a little bit squishy without being plump, and he had long ago lost his clothing but was self-possessed even in his underpants.   

I certainly didn’t think of it this way at the time, but this rubber Mickey seemed to have attained a state of spiritual enlightenment. Yes, he was Buddha-like, and if I didn’t exactly rub his belly, I certainly enjoyed giving him a squeeze now and then, because that released a small satisfying squeak. I realized that he was a baby-toy, and I didn’t exactly tote him around in public, but I liked knowing he was there. Was that so wrong?

Here’s the awful part. When I had attained the advanced age of eight and had been Mickey’s owner for as long as I could remember, I came home one day to discover him gone. In an impulsive gesture of munificence that at the same time underscores the difficulties my family had with concepts such as boundaries, privacy, and personal possessions, my mother had given my Mickey away to a little three-year-old boy who lived next door. I was outraged and heartbroken. “How DARE you?” I sobbed.

My mother was genuinely surprised. She hadn’t known how much I loved that rubber Mickey Mouse. No one did. Not even me. In fact, it is quite possible that the theft of him and the giving away of him are what transformed the small glow of my affection into a veritable conflagration. My heart welled with unprecedented passion for the beloved Mickey Mouse toy. 

“I didn’t realize you still played with the thing,” my mother said. Of course her words only made me angrier, because even then I suspected there might be some protocol involving inquiries made to the owner before transferring a possession. I suspected, too, that generosity with someone else’s belongings did not carry as many points in God’s book of Genuine Good Deeds. And I knew for sure that my mother, a legendary hoarder, was generally quite resistant to giving things away; I wondered what had come over her and why it had to happen with Mickey. MY Mickey. In short, I was inconsolable. My tears and frustration escalated as the melodrama fed on itself.

Even so, I was willing to let the drama play out, as it usually did, in the privacy of our home, where volatility was the norm, and eventually it would have all whimpered away. But now my mother did the next awful thing: she telephoned the mother of the little boy next door and told her that I was terribly upset and wanted my rubber Mickey Mouse back.

Oh, she gave it back to me, all right. She knocked on the door, Mickey in tow, and asked to speak to me directly. “I thought you were a much nicer girl than this,” she said, “and I thought you were a big girl, but here’s your baby-toy back, and you’ve taken it away from a little boy, and I hope you’re happy.”

I wasn’t happy at all.

I took back the Mickey Mouse, but all I felt was embarrassment and shame, and he looked at me with his blank, benign eyes, and smiled his meaningless smile. I squeezed him half-heartedly and the little squeak sounded pathetic. He had lost his Buddha-esque ability to calm me and cheer me, and it suddenly seemed he should belong to someone else. He had been my very first toy, or the first I could remember, and when I was a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a big girl, I put away childish things.

And maybe the gap in me that never goes away has something to do with my abruptly truncated relationship with Mickey Mouse. Which might explain the weird elation I experienced when I saw him lying in a showcase at one of the little thrift stores in town the other day. I asked the white-haired woman behind the counter if I could hold him for a moment. “Oh, yes,” she said, “vintage 1950’s.”

I told her that long ago I’d owned one just like it, and I had loved it very dearly.

“Twenty dollars,” said the lady. “You can have him again.”

I declined.

He was a rubber Mickey, nothing more. I pictured myself bringing him home, stuffing him into a drawer somewhere, just to know I owned him. I couldn’t see the point of it. Who needs another object to remind us what's been lost?

I knew I could never reclaim it.