Kay will likely be gone from this earth before morning, her tired body on its way to ashen grit and her spirit, stubborn as a Missouri mule (though she was, on a cellular level, a Chicago girl), on its way to the heaven she believes in.
She is the only sister of Mack and his two brothers, is the family’s heart and its vault, keeper of old photographs and stories, Ft. Knox of lore and truth and gossip. Since her mother died decades ago, she has been our sticky center. When she is gone, no one will take her place; there will only be a hole, with raveling edges, in our fabric.
How ill she was was known just to her and her only daughter, who was sworn to secrecy. There was to be no drama, no people rushing to Chicago and spending money on ridiculous last-minute airfares. Hints, like the smell of smoke from a neighbor’s chimney, came in sentences she wouldn’t finish, in oddly brief and infrequent phone calls. She began to contract: folding in on herself, not eating much, her voice hard to hear and hoarse. She slept; she made some plans; she felt both a deepening struggle and a strange lightness. She knew a door was going to open. A few of us felt the draft.
My Amy’s birthday was last week, and Kay’s card came uncharacteristically late, with an apology among the sweet handwritten things she always wrote – what a wonderful girl you are, how kind, how proud she was. The ending was a sentence she had never written before: “I will love you forever.”
Mack and his brothers are on planes, flying as fast as they can to get to her and say goodbye, though the words will utterly fail them. I imagine a map with pins and string: one from the farthest southwest corner, one from the western plains, one from D.C., converging in the rough-and-tumble, the windy winter bonecold of Chicago, where all of them were born and one of them is about to die.
Dear Kay, we know you gave us so much more than we gave back, and we are dumbstruck at imagining any of our lives without you. We were like birds – handsome, bright-colored males who got all the attention while you fluttered, short and beige and industrious, in the background, running the machinery of the family. We hope you will be warm in your new home, that Everyone’s Favorite Uncle John has the place tidied up to your liking when you get there, and that all the windows are open. We want you to know that you were the perfect sister. We will love you forever.
One of the fish in the pond got sucked into the recirculating intake pipe and died in the filter basket with a few snails and a wad of slimy water lettuce.
I don’t remember what Simone named that one, but its body was solid shimmering white and its head was the color of an apricot - Ghost, maybe. Curiosity — “I wonder what’s in that strange round opening” — apparently kills more than cats. Poor fish, slammed around inside a plastic cage by relentless rushing water, in the dark. I wonder if it couldn’t catch its breath or starved or just said “fuck this” and gave up. Do its four friends know it’s gone? Do they miss him? Or was Ghost a her, and why does this make me sadder?
There is a kind of loneliness so profound it’s hard to describe. A unconnectedness, as if not even air quite touches my body; there is a layer of nothing, microns deep, between me and the rest of all that is the world. I don’t think about it often, only when the confidence I am famous for breaks like the shell on a boiled egg and before another layer grows. While it hardens, I am vulnerable, wide open to wounding.
This might explain why I crave touch, warm skin, the muffled thump of a beating heart. My ear, pressed against Mack’s neck just below the hinge of his jaw, finds the whoosh of blood pulsing to his face and his brain, the food for his ability to smile and blink, to reason and wonder. If I turn and place my closed eye there, his heartbeat echoes in my head, thinning the nothingness layer to almost-gone. Like warm sand on bare feet or a hairbrush against my scalp, it is the cat-arch of good feeling that I want to just keep happening until the sun implodes.
Recently I decided to finish our bedroom, a place that had, over eight years, become a warehouse for things that belonged nowhere: boxes, ugly sun-bleached curtains that didn’t fit, a sloppy bed. Lots of time, angst and dollars later, the windows are nicely draped and the pillows on the couch make me smile. But the coverlet I was sure was the key to my loving this room only makes it harder to make the bed, which explains why it spends half the days folded in half and flung over a chair. It’s a little like making that incredibly delicious cake that the majority of people at your dinner table refuse (on account of all.those.calories) which prompts you to have a huge piece (at least I will appreciate this!) despite your tight ass jeans. Are you happy now?
I want to think I would be happier if I were closer - all the time - to more people who love me, if I (or we, but Mack snorts at that thought) lived somewhere near San Francisco. See, except for my girl, her husband, and Simone, almost all of my people are scattered ashes, and we live down here among the ‘steps,’ only a few of whom are glad Mack has been married for nearly thirty years to the woman he has actually loved for all of those plus fifteen more. If all you care about is someone’s money, you tend to pfffft at real love, especially if you don't have any. That makes for awkward holiday chit-chat and is my number two reason (behind adoring those three up north) for bolting up the freeway at the drop of a hat. It also chips at my eggshell, tapping at a weak spot, aiming to hurt. I try not to care about the not-so-subtle meannesses; I am ashamed for even noticing; I scold myself to stop it.
Give me a soft jacket, an old one from half a life ago with pockets furry on the insides, and a red scarf. In the cool of a early autumn evening, I will sit on the side of the fountain and wait for the pump to stop and the four survivors to drift from under the matted roots into the clear water around the waterlilies. They will dart and glide, staying near each other and then swimming away to the corners of their rectangular sea, watching for food that might magically appear, and avoiding the ominous hole that ate their pale friend.
“October” was derived, I’m certain, from some ancient word that meant “big spiders.” Around here, those monsters bounce in loose, end-of-season webs hung with egg cases and wait for one last summer bug to suck the life out of or death by winter, whichever comes first. The breeze that rocks them is cool, hinting at damp; summer’s oven wind, the fire-spreader, is gone, the potential baby spiders safe from being incinerated until spring. Outside my office window, the elm’s leaves are changing from vibrant green to sick yellow; the finches will come back for those few days when the color camouflage is perfect, before there is nothing left but determined gestating spider wads hanging from bare branches.
Fall is a manic time in the garden. I hurry to root out the old and buy new before the growers run out of things to sell and close down for the holidays and all of January, before the rains we’ve been promised might actually come for the first time in an entire thirsty year. My left bionic hip is still not strong enough for me to drive a spade into the ground with my boot, so I direct my helpers, Luis and Felix, by gesturing at tired shrubs and broken sprinkler heads with my cane. Tapping around the beds and along the flagstone paths, marking things for execution, I find sticky webs and secreted eggs, covered in fuzz like tiny tennis balls, in odd places: the hole-side of a gate latch (stuffed so full the damn thing won’t click shut), inside an upended, empty pot, and strung eye-high across my path between nearly every tree and the closest downspout. I swing my cane like a scythe, breaking the silk free before it wraps around my head. The strands glue themselves to the cane shaft, and soon I am dragging nests behind me like a dress train made of dirty gossamer and awkward pompoms.
Many years ago I drove to Carmel in October, pulling up into the steep driveway at what we called The Second San Luis House just before midnight. I don’t remember what the bad news was — and the season doesn’t correspond with what I know were the milestones of my father’s physical decline and eventual death — only that there was some, that I took a deep breath before I opened the car door and got out of the driver’s seat with the taste of dread in my mouth. Marge had forgotten to turn on any outside lights; the living room floated — a small, homely gold — above a deep of unbroken black: oaks and conifers, the quiet hillside, the starless, moonless sky. I felt my way across the asphalt and up the flagstone steps with my feet acting like a blind person’s cane, nudging the next riser, feeling for hard surfaces, avoiding slippery drifts of pine needles. Dense hedges of prickly ceanothus and hollies lined the stair and the patio at the top, behind the house, waiting to snag your sweater or scratch any skin that got close. Having made it to the house without injury, I opened the unlocked kitchen door and went in, softly calling “yoo-hoo.”
My memory is gappy after that. I know Dad was sleeping and we talked about him without him, but quietly. Hannah, their yellow lab, ambled out from her bed next to his to be polite and say hello but without any of her usual body-wagging enthusiasm. Whatever was wrong — and something clearly was; I just can’t remember what — wasn’t horrible, just sad and inevitable. We sat and talked, hugged and cried a little, warm by the fire and a ticking clock. After a while we decided whatever else needed saying could wait until morning and I should get my bag out of the car. Marge said, “Oh, shoot. I didn’t turn on the lights for you. I’m so sorry. Here, let me get the switch.” The floods set in the eaves of the house, front and back, and all along the driveway came on, bright as a sports stadium for a night game. I grabbed her forearm and said, “Oh, god. Look.”
Outside the front door and along the deck, two stories above the descending hillside, were a couple dozen huge native shrubs, closely planted, curving away to the far end of the house and then around to the back patio, merging with the shorter, stabbier plants that lined the steps I had climbed in the dark. Gigantic spider webs, each five feet in diameter, looking for all the world like ropy crocheted blankets, covered the bushes from top to bottom. They reflected the artificial light, glowing, silver as tinsel. In the middle of each web was a big dark spider, clinging and awake, its knuckled legs carefully feeling for the twang of a catch in the night. The Carmel damp had hung droplets of water on the strands, glittering against the leaves’ dull dark green. Ground fog filled the space between tree trunks and shrubs behind the web wall all the way down to the street, covering my car and the driveway. We turned and looked out the back windows - the spiders and their spun creations surrounded the house on all sides; it was a gapless spider wall, a web fortress.
I said, “I can’t believe I walked through that and didn’t know. I’m not going out there 'til morning, and maybe not even then. Maybe we can be helicoptered out. Can I borrow a nightgown?” Marge, a country woman who usually sniffed at my city folk ways, nodded without comment and went to get one.
I walked back to the front to watch the fairy tale spiders riding in identical loopy, swaying homes that looked like rotten sails on weird ships. A thin wind wobbled them once, twice; the spiders wiggled and resettled. I shivered. Then a sharp, hard gust snapped through the branches from behind, and all the little water droplets flew out of the webs at once, arcing, to shatter, suddenly light- and lifeless, on the deck, ten thousand spider tears.
Dozens of white boats rocked on the blue bay, their masts pointing at the cloudless sky like uneven pencils in a cup. Inside the yacht club a few hundred people who had loved Ken listened to eulogies about him over the music of clanking chains and wavelets slapping fiberglass.
As different as the speakers and their connections to him were, they described exactly the same man, a testament to Ken’s lack of pretense and refusal to mask up. The speeches were what you hope for (but rarely get) — touching, sincere, often funny, all Ken-centric. One described how he had died at home, at his desk, and that when Beth went upstairs and looked in, he was sitting up straight with his eyes open, and she immediately thought he was pulling one of his famous pranks, pretending to be dead. The first thing she said to his too-pale face was “Is this a joke?”
Like a bomb going off, his death stunned our summer and its shock waves broke our voices, stuck in our throats. There were many versions of Where I Was When I Heard the News; it was clear that most of us were stuck in the finding-out phase and hadn’t yet replaced surprise with grief.
Three thousand miles east on that same Thursday, Simone skipped happily ahead of her mother into the cabin where she would stay for the next month with three other 10-year-old girls and a counselor. Out the window next to her bed she could see the rest of the compound: the shore of a navy-blue lake, a dock of silvered boards, pine and fir trees shading more cabins, other summer girl campers hugging and squealing hellos, their legs bared to the mosquitos, cheeks and noses pink in the sun. She was excited to swim first thing every day before breakfast, like last year, to get better at waterskiing, to see her old and new friends.
This July and August are the knife’s edge between Maine and California, elementary and middle school, childhood and what comes next. Her flats are beginning to round. She can tell the One Direction boys’ voices apart inside a song on the radio. Soon she will be running, not skipping, pounding uphill to the next challenge, away from us, from me. She grows more sure-footed as I begin to limp, stumble. I forget words faster than she learns them. She plumps as I shrivel. Life can’t happen fast enough for Simone, and I would trade everything I used to think mattered if it would slow down.
Back in San Francisco the next morning, as his daughter was showing some prospective campers and their parents around and singing the praises of canoeing and washing your hair in the lake, Chris was driving to work. His summers are busy and full of travel; he was cramming before a trip and had headed downtown in the very early light, catching the timed greens block after block on California Street. His small SUV was crossing Franklin; there was a burgundy blur; his instincts screamed “go left,” so he did.
Two seconds. Two cars had met and smashed, shoved and spun, air bags deployed. The crash was loud; the whump and shatter, the concussive bang was heard for blocks. The air around them burned with propellant and hot dust and fear. Chris got out of the car, thinking it was on fire, then got back in, then got out again. The man who had barreled through the red light owned up without excuse, said that he was sorry and completely at fault. Phone calls were made, and cops came and tow trucks, names and details keyed in; people stared from cars that crept by, looking for blood or bodies.
The two men stood in the smear of broken plastic parts and underbody dirt on the asphalt, looking at the ruined front of the Honda, buckled back to the windshield, and the destroyed side of the SUV. By reacting to the oncoming car, Chris had presented his VW’s flank to the impact. Just behind the center door post, where Simone was usually strapped into the right rear passenger seat, was a crater.
The sorry man had run out of words, and the necessities were nearly completed. Chris looked away from the bent metal and into the man’s eyes and said, “I’m really glad my daughter wasn’t with me.” The man, without hesitation, said, “I am too. And mine too.” Chris nodded.
And summer goes on, with its noise and heat, sun and sweat, its cool water to splash in, with laughter for some and tears for others, some expected and just as many not, same as always.
Neither of my grandparents used a cane, I don’t think, nor did my mother, who was content to simply slink through her final years of boozy ill health. After brain surgery, my dad was in a wheelchair for a while but skipped the cane step, preferring instead to Frankenstein around from then on, lurching into walls and knocking over lamps.
People with canes, I used to think (if I ever actually wondered about it), were weak or frail (as if holding onto a cane would keep a brittle leaf of an old woman from being bowled over by a stiff wind) or slightly wobbly on only two legs (the reason stools have three). I assumed a grey-haired man would lean on a cane while wishing there were a bench nearby for a quick sit rather like a younger fellow might rely on a high counter with his elbows to give his back a rest. I imagined a cane was for boosting a heavily hunched person or steadying someone at a tilt, maybe for adding an inch to a too-short leg. People walking with canes were slow and they took up the middles of aisles, but they did so nicely. Using a cane, to me, was like wearing a badge of age-induced infirmity, of benign ricketiness. I had never associated any of the infirmities a cane-user might have with actual pain. It isn’t as though old people who use canes are wincing with every off-step as they tap-tap down the sidewalk. And if I had witnessed an occasional grimace, I figured, well, geriatric folks grimace about a lot of things because they can sometimes be cranky. It hadn’t seemed at all as if they were hurting, just slightly unsteady.
Then, in the last few years of her life, my stepmother Margery used a cane (and sometimes a wheelchair) for long stretches of time, sometimes months. After her Billy (my dad) died, she lost her captive audience. A lifetime of smoking and asthma clamped down on her lungs and deprived her brain of oxygen. She had always craved attention and she knew that people with visible maladies got a lot of it. Also, although she wasn’t thinking all that clearly (what an understatement), she was adamant there wasn’t a thing wrong with her that some orthopedic magician couldn’t cure. Combining these things became a nightmare.
One of her ankles developed a probem that kept her from wearing shoes with high heels just after her 80th birthday. She found a surgeon who was doing - revolutionary! first ever! – ankle joint replacements and signed herself right up. Then she had to have a new hip like all her friends were getting, despite the fact that both her hips were reasonably good. Then there were revision surgeries – do-overs – once on the ankle and twice on the hip, finding doctors farther and farther from her town who took her fudged/smudged intake history and didn’t bother to have a copy of her medical records forwarded to them. They operated on her again and again, as she insisted they must, although she had terrible pulmonary complications and a MRSA infection in the ankle wound that required three more hospitalizations. All of this plus: neither her ankle nor her hip was ever better afterward than it had been before. Her background as a nurse and her charm helped convince them, I guess, plus the ability to bill Medicare, the State of California retirees’ insurer and TriCare (my dad had been a naval officer) for all those fees. Stubborn, in denial about a long list of sad truths and suffering from increasing periods of hypoxia and dementia, when she wasn’t in a hospital room receiving visitors and flowers and cards like a queen in her audience chamber, she stomped around her little town, barging into people and whacking things with what she called her walking stick. A grande dame of a woman with bright blue eyes, a cute hat, a booming voice and a big cane making a Watch This entrance into a restaurant gets every head to turn, and she seemed to need that as much as – or more than - her next breath. I hated her canes and wheelchairs, symbols of her defiant and humiliating scenery-chewing, her irrationality and belligerence, her refusal/inability to still be the woman I had loved so much, the Before Bad Times Margery.
She died four years ago at the age of 88, and I’ve spent much of that time trying to forget what she looked like during the great decline so I could remember her, instead, doing her model-walk in some dishy outfit or dancing in a pair of high-heeled cowboy boots. Her loathsome cane went in the Goodwill pile when I cleaned out her condo for the new owners. I had turned 60 on my birthday in the spring of that year, and I didn’t think for one second about keeping it around just in case.
Fast-forward to last February. My left hip, an occasional annoyance for about a year, had become a continuous, increasing pain in my actual ass. Since I finally had decent medical insurance coverage without a zillion-dollar deductible (thanks, Obama!), I decided to have it looked at by the local orthopedic docs. A few x-rays, consults, cortisone shots, intensive physical therapy and some sudden (but not unusual, I’m told) deterioration of the remaining tattered scrap of cartilage in there, and I am on the surgery schedule in late September for a Total Hip Arthroplasty ‘cuz there’s nothing I like better than an acronym that sounds like a tongue/teeth mistake: THA.
I now have my own cane that is never farther away from me than an arm’s length. If I don't have it, I can’t move because – big surprise for me, the inveterate cane-basher – having a hip joint so bum it qualifies to be replaced by a mechanical substitute hurts like, well, a motherfucker.
It feels like there is a softball-size rotten tooth in my hip joint, a capsule of sticky inflammation packed with bits of broken glass way down in there. The ache reaches up and back toward the lowest curve of my spine and down to my knee, and on bad days and at night into my calf; it throbs with my heartbeat, fires into tendons and muscles, pinches nerves that scream. The bones themselves, femur and pelvis and tibia, grip the pain as if it is what glues their chalk together; it hurts from deep inside all the way out to the skin. It hurts so much that I move my leg – one degree of rotation, slide an inch left, then right – trying to find some position it likes, even though I know that moving it at all makes the pain worse; it is diabolical. I saw Words and Pictures, a movie in which Juliette Binoche plays a woman with rheumatoid arthritis who can’t open an Rx bottle of pain pills with her aching, swollen hands, so, her face a floodplain of tears, she smashes it with a hammer. It hurts exactly like that.
I take pills. Naproxen, an anti-inflammatory, at high (but allowable) doses was enough for a while. When it wasn’t, I took more and then still more until red freckles started appearing on my forearms and the backs of my hands, burst capillaries, and I knew I had to stop the triple overdosing. A couple weeks ago was a bad spell, and one night in bed I wondered if amputation was an option. I had taken an AI, then another full dose, then a painkiller, all without the slightest relief. I got up, took another painkiller and a random sleeping pill i scrounged from the back of the medicine cabinet, figuring that was way too much but if it took me down, at least I'd be unconscious when it happened. The next day I told the mirror: You have to drive and deal with Mack and All The Things, plus you're all too aware of how easily you could be an addict (and there are three months to wait), so big-time opioids are out. Last year Tramadol made me feel like I was on Mars so I wouldn't take it, but now I’m happy to go there on a once-a-day, timed-release ride. The normal-dose NSAID and semi-opioid, I hope, will hold me until mid-September when they nix the Naproxen for potential-blood-loss reasons. Those last two weeks might get ugly.
I rely entirely on my cane to get up out of a chair or the driver’s seat of my car. I lean heavily on it with my right hand whenever my left foot touches the ground. The cane bears my weight, holds me up, allows me to move. Without it, I couldn’t make it from my office to the kitchen. That's a long way from last January when I strode 30 blocks from the East Village to meet friends at a deli for lunch, loping happily along those New York sidewalks on a sunny winter morning. Now I sympathize with Margery’s disdain at having to wear what she called Buster Browns, but canes and flat shoes go together, not canes and high heels. I grumble but am resigned to plod heel-less until September.
The literature says severe osteoarthritis of the hip is caused by obesity or overuse. I prefer to think (those 20 pounds notwithstanding) that I put my hips to frequent and strenuous good use – dancing, of course – that has worn them out, and now it’s time to fix them and move on. To this end, I will even be a compliant and not-grouchy cane-user, but not on a $19.95 adjustable metal-and-plastic Made in China special from CVS, oh, no.
A lovely woman who makes custom canes out of strong, beautiful wood is designing one for me. The new cane will have a grip of tiger maple, shaped to fit my hand, that sits above a cocobolo collar and a padauk shaft. It will hold me up until my new left hip heals, and shortly after that (I have learned the miserable lesson of what happens when you wait too long) it will migrate to my other hand while the right hip is THA’d. Once I am fully bionic and back to my hip-swinging, heel-wearing, block-striding self, I plan to hang this beautiful cane somewhere in Casa de Swell as wall art.
When I first knew him, his name was Mr. Wood and he was the quiet, serious criminal defense lawyer, up the stairs from reception, down the hall, second office on the left. On his desk were tidy fans of clipped-together papers, corners matched and edges aligned. He was tall and squareish, already losing his hair, and quite intimidating (though not as much as Mr. H) to an 18-year-old newbie file clerk in 1968. A few years later, after a boomerang to LA, I came back to 3200 Fourth Avenue as the firm’s bookkeeper for a year, and he was a little friendlier – they all were – but that’s probably because I was 24 (instead of a teenager), and I wrote the paychecks and opened the mail they obsessed over. I was answering the phones there during the receptionist’s lunch hour one day when Mack called for Mr. Wood and resurrected our romance that has now lasted 40 years, but that’s a whole different story.
In 1975 I became a court reporter, he was my first client, and his name changed to Ken. With a handful of exceptions, I reported every deposition he took until I retired, almost 30 years – cases for insurance bad faith, the tuna boat that sank off Central America, the badly injured boy who ran off a bus in the then-brand-new development of Mira Mesa that had no schools, the man who was electrocuted by SDG&E lines in his front-yard tree, business disputes, family estate fights, the whole crazy range of civil litigation. Working with him was a court reporter’s dream job – he spoke in these perfectly constructed sentences at a steady 200+ words per minute, politely controlled witnesses who wanted to talk on top of his questions and lawyers who were snarly. He was businesslike and direct and careful. He treated everyone with respect. He asked me how best to handle exhibits and did exactly as I suggested, wasting no time, leaving no knots to untie later. I can still see his lefty printing on documents, straight and sure black rollerball lines, EX and a number, upper right corner. It is his 4 without lifting the pen that I copied and make to this day. The real-time transcripts I produced during his depositions were almost perfect first drafts; I never ever worked for anyone who made a better record than Ken.
He was very, very smart without being a know-it-all. He could tell when someone was trying to play him in a case but never pulled stunts like that himself. He was professional without being stiff or arch; he was honest. He could be canny and had a great poker face when asking a loaded question. He was a far better lawyer than others who got a lot more ink, but he never shoved anyone aside on his way to the microphone or waved his own banner.
Ken was charming in a completely authentic way. And funny, with that big ha-ha-ha laugh and his gappy grin. He was a terrific storyteller, and he smiled with his eyes. I don’t think I have ever known a more genuine, un-phony man. He was kind, really kind, and he cared – frankly and forthrightly – about things and people that mattered to him. He loved his kids and adored – adored – his wife. I can see him talking about her and these sometimes romantic places they had been – he would wink and Beth would raise an eyebrow and give a little shrug.
There are a couple of Ken stories that outline him for me.
Shortly after Mack and I were married in 1988 I invited 25 or so of our closest friends over for dinner and waded confidently into water way over my head. Amy and I were in the kitchen struggling to get the main course out. With time ticking away in the dining room, people rattling silverware and running out of small talk, I began to think I might panic. Just then, Ken came in, asked if he could help, didn’t wait for an answer, started slicing steaks and delivering plates to relieved and hungry people, doing what needed to be done, and saved my bacon. Long before that night, he got me out of a different messy jam that no one else would touch, and taught me a hard lesson about friendship.
He liked to tease, usually in a funny, harmless way that might, at worst, make you blush, but once in a while he was as relentless as an older brother.
We had been on a road trip taking depositions in Miami, day after day of slogging through testimony and documents, evenings spent wandering through parking lots with a bunch of other lawyers trying to find stone crab. It was winter but sunny and warm in Florida. On the way back home, exhausted and cranky, we all flew to Dallas for a connecting flight, only to find that everything was delayed by a vicious snow and ice storm. Many hours later, finally in the jetway, I was stuck a half-step from the plane’s open door, wearing flimsy cotton clothes and a pair of sandals, with a 20 degree wind flinging ice shards at my foolish-beach-girl self. Wet and shivering in my seat, Ken in his, we took off into inky darkness, banging and shaking, the plane bucking like a rodeo bronco. I might have forgotten to mention to Ken that I wasn’t exactly a fearless flier, might have just offhandedly said that I didn’t love turbulence. As we lurched up, down and sideways, going from momentary weightlessness to G’s pinning us to our seats, he started making fun of how tightly I was gripping the armrests and how it seemed that the cat had got my tongue except for the occasional falsetto squeak. I wanted to punch him. Through clenched teeth I said, “Stop it! It’s not funny!” He said, “I’m sorry. I can’t make the turbulence stop, so I was just trying to distract you.” Staring down this sincere attempt by a nice guy who was just trying to help out, I think I hissed, “Well, it’snot working!!”
I missed seeing him at the memorial service for Jeanie’s mother last Wednesday, July 2nd, because I was putting Simone on a plane that was late. My dear friend Gail sat next to him and Beth and chatted about things that you chat about at a gathering after someone dies – other people who have died (one husband each, for Gail and another woman at the table), how people cope. Two days later – two more lunches later – it was Friday, the Fourth of July, and Ken died. This calendar blip, these three rectangles that say Wednesday, Thursday, Friday – when I see them on my computer monitor, I just shake my head: no, no, no. Why was the plane late? Why was there fog in San Francisco? Why on that day? I see Beth pretty often because we have lunch with a group every month and we had gone to a movie just a week before – the final thing I said, walking to my car, was, “Tell Ken we said hi!” – but I haven’t seen Ken in a while – a year? – and I can’t wish any harder that I’d made it to that memorial for one more smile and a hard shoulder hug. I wasn’t there because I must have been on Mars; that’s what it feels like, like I should have somehow known.
All weekend, since Friday, Mack and I have been looking at each other with these weird unblinking eyes (when I’m not crying) and saying things like, “I hope it was over in an instant.” I picture Steve Jobs saying he thinks dying is like flipping off a light switch: On, and then, a nanosecond later, not On anymore. If, instead, it involves being afraid and feeling pain, right now I would rather not know. I think of the hiking trip that Mack went on decades ago with Ken and Jim and that other friend whose name I can’t remember, how many times Ken told bits of those stories, how ridiculous and scary and hilarious it was, the trip and each repeat of its details – the marmot, Mack’s blisters and dehydration and borrowed boots, the Groucho Marx walk on the ridge. When we tell it the next time – and we surely will – Ken will be there, in the story, wearing a shirt that says, in faint little letters, “But I’m gone now.”
It isn’t real for me yet, that he isn’t coming back. The more you love someone, the longer it takes for that to sink in. In the meantime, I’ll see him in every tall, bald guy wearing a plaid shirt and wire-rim glasses. I’ll wish, when I’m stuck next to some boring, superficial man at a dinner table, that Ken were there so we could have an actual talk about actual things. I know that there is no answer to Why Him and Why Now, that it isn’t any more complicated than that his heart broke on a certain Friday. I know that as much as his wife and children, his grandchildren and friends miss him, they – we – are all equally lucky that he was there, occupying these big, important places in each of our lives. And, finally, I know that the world would be a better place with one more Ken Wood in it instead of one less, that his death is, in ways as big as one of the mountains he climbed and as small as a salty tear, a tragedy.
Two old men, veterans of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy by US, Canadian and British forces to free France, begin the liberation of Europe and defeat Germany's Third Reich, were sitting earlier today behind President Obama as he spoke at the 70th anniversary of D-Day at the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, near Omaha Beach. These men, 93 and 94 years old, are from California and wanted to go to France for this occasion but were leery of traveling so far on their own.
Our friend Bruce, a lawyer here in town, offered to take them and be, as he called it, their bagman, to meet them at the airport in Paris and manage all the details from there. He was listening to the President today too, from a seat somewhere on the fringe, applauding his traveling companions with, I'm sure, his eyes welling. He got these two codgers from CDG to Normandy and into a beautiful home that was donated to house them and other veterans; he has driven the rented car and taken them to see where their fellow soldiers climbed cliffs and slogged through sand and where many thousands of them died trying to do their part. Bruce made sure that these guys got three squares a day, found the closest bathroom fast and even pitched in when the 93 yo wanted a tub bath and a back scrub and couldn't manage on his own. Old men often need a hand. Bruce is generous, selfless, has a huge heart and believes in honor; a better bagman doesn't exist.
Bruce's wife Gail is in Paris, watching it on TV and waiting for him to get back to her after putting the vets safely on planes headed home to California. I was supposed to be there with her in an apartment we had rented, giddy with excitement to have five days of shared luxury with a great good friend, no schedules, no men, looking forward to walking and sketching, writing and taking iPhone pics, searching for good coffee and fabulous food and trying not to shop too much, but I was here with another old man who was ill, for a brief time gravely so, instead of on Rue Barbette. Paris isn't going anywhere, my dad would have said, a vet himself of the Pacific theater of the same war, the pilot of a Corsair. He was also, for too short a time, an old man.
We all measure events against others of the same category that we know best. The wars of my generation in Vietnam and Iraq made me a pacifist in great part because I hold them up against World War II, a war against evil so obvious that American men flooded enlistment offices to fight it. The soldiers and Marines fought no less bravely in these more recent wars, but the reasons they were given to do so were suspect and dishonest. To offer up your self, even to your last breath, to free people you don't even know, to be some small part of the defeat of a beast like Adolf Hitler, as despicable a person as has ever existed, and to do it without a second thought or a backward glance is something I haven't experienced and can't truly know. But I understand what the President said today, "When the world makes you a cynic, remember these men."
When Mack is well again, maybe I'll take him with me, back to the cliffs and craters at Pointe du Hoc, the long, wide stretches of sand on the beaches that arc from Vierville-sur-Mer to Deauville, and to the American cemetery. We will go not as tourists but as pilgrims. I want to sit on the grass among the hundreds of rows of headstones and listen to the waves breaking beyond the trees and below the bluffs. I want to press my cheek against the cold white marble that stands guard over the body of someone who would be an old man now if he hadn't so willingly died for the good of the world, and say thank you.
Far into rural central Texas, miles from even the barest collection of people and buildings that might be called a town, winter holds on. The sun, lukewarm at noon, gathers its puny February strength for the photographer's hour that begins at what is barely late afternoon in June. Every horse has a Peter Pan shadow stitched to its hooves that stretches far across the dank field stubble; the trees throw not shade but a bitter dark. The outside cat who lives here doesn't shed, saving her thick coat for the icy nights she spends stalking mice.
I came here to find time. Not sentences but paragraphs of it, maybe pages. It has disappeared from our house; interruptions shred and toss it to be carried off like confetti in a storm. I thought it might be waiting for me here.
State highway to county roads, two lanes but still a surprising 60 miles an hour, to farm roads, then what locals call spurs, then lanes. I stopped at a cemetery in Ruterville to read the German family names, take some photos, make a curly-haired, blue-eyed bull's acquaintance. He bellowed and left when his cows, far down near a barn, began to moo. Jealous women. A bit farther on was a road that had once been paved that led to one that was just dirt -- clay and small, sharp stones -- packed so hard for so long the surface was polished. It reminded me of the wagon wheel ruts across the Kansas prairie where even now, a hundred years later, nothing will grow. Puddles in the potholes and along the verge said it had rained recently. Rail fences and rusted barbed wire, a few cattle, oaks. The sign for the inn I'm stayed at is a piece of weathered wood with a blue arrow pointing to a graveled parking area. There are names on creosote planks. I pulled the rented Kia up to Belle Starr. Of course.
This time in my life feels like one of those months that isn't part of a season, March or maybe September. Unsettled. Some change is coming, a big one maybe, but exactly what or when isn't clear. Maybe not something good. A lovely breeze that grows to a howling blow, and in an instant what was a little thrilling is half a sycamore crashing through your roof. Fear floats in the back of my mouth.
Not much is open around here on Sunday nights. I unpacked and smooshed pillows, wandered outside among the empty cottages - I'm the only guest tonight, no caretaker even; just me and the cat - switched on lamps against the gloom, and headed back to have not the barbeque I wanted but (more) Mexican food at Las Patrones in town. It's a big room you enter through a door in the middle of a narrow front porch. A couple was drinking at a table out there, slurring intently. The just-OK food was helped by some good hot salsa. The bartender didn't skimp on tequila in the house margarita I surprised myself by ordering, served in the same kind of mug root beer used to come in, a juicy chunk of lime on the side. Belly full and on the first step of tipsy, I walked in the careful way drinkers do past the still-disagreeing porch couple and over to my car, parked near a tree. Tsk-tsking at myself for slurping down the last third of that drink before getting behind the wheel, I turned the key, slapped my cheeks and started chewing a stick of Juicy Fruit.
Driving just carefully enough those five retraced miles, I turned onto the charming dirt track just as the sun set behind a hillside full of twisted oaks. It wasn't that, though. Might have been the crown of the road or the backlit grasses, maybe the crackle of the sunflower stalks shaken by a gust. Something I saw flipped a switch and I was suddenly crying wide open. I wiped my flooded face with my palms, scooped wet handfuls that dripped down my wrists and soaked my sweater cuffs. I was a snottty, sobbing mess, having a booze-fueled meltdown like those in the bad old days when I'd wail along with Linda Ronstadt's "You're No Good," only minus the anger.
Well, maybe not minus all the anger, if I'm telling the entire truth. It's not anger at a bad boy's crappy behavior or at myself for craving bad boy's body in spite of that. Mack and I are far past that, stopped acting out like that decades ago. We are settled, married, still very much in love. We trust; we know. Backstops, hands in each other's pockets, imprinted on each other's scent like wild animals that mate for life, that's us.
But ... I swallow, typing it. Years, time. There are changes. Same as skin that folds in the same place over and over makes a wrinkle. Sometimes, not all the time, but increasingly often he will do something, question something, say no instead of yes, want to stay instead of go, and a memory elbows its way in - his father late in life, when we used to lock eyes over his head or behind his back. My bones go cold. I take a huge breath and let it out, slowly, eyes closed, lips bitten. I think: I miss him, the Before Mack, the brave, sure-let's-do-it Mack, who never got edgy in a car or complained about headlights or driving at night, the Mack who would never ever do those things. The man I could barely keep up with. I miss him, my tenacious, win-every-contest man, the unstoppable, solid, strong Mack.
It rips my heart to ribbons that this is happening to him, and I eat guilt for wanting it to stop as much for me as for him. I know someday it will be my turn to be the one heads are shaken about, people feel sorry for, whose fingers worry over buttons; my subconscious and conscious selves dread this; I get it. But when it does, I won't fucking know, will I, that I've become an object of pity? I *know this*: I see him, every slip and miss and uncharacteristic remark, every thing he can't do, won't try, looks at with suspicion. All the So Not Like Him things. I see him struggling to hold on, to deny it, all of it, hating it. And I find my fingers curled into fists with nothing to hit.
I know I can't stop it, this slide, not his and not mine that will come in time, long after his. I can't fix him, reverse it, change him or this awful process. I can't tell him or snap at him, can't hurt him. All I can do is ease the way, keep him safe. And miss him. Oh, and I do. I was going through a box of old photographs, found one of us on a beach, my rugged bronze man. I reached for him. And then put the box away. I didn't want to remember.
I have the luxury of these escapes, breaks from the afternoons of clenched jaws and repeating things. I stay only two or three days, a carry-on trip, not a suitcase. Food won't spoil while I'm gone; half-a-loaf-of-bread trips. Anonymous places, cool green places, places where my disquiet is soothed by either the calm or the bustle. I will have these while it's still possible to go.
Tomorrow I'll be finished crying, my stuff will go back in a bag and I will leave this flowered bed, red dirt hideaway. I'll drive dry-eyed (I hope) back toward the big city airport. I might stop at that bakery in La Grange for another brownie and at Mueller's in Austin for smoked brisket. I will fly west across the dusty parts of Texas and southern New Mexico and Arizona, hurrying back to the coyotes and our red-tiled home, the agaves and lavender, and especially to the warm skin and brown eyes of the man I have loved all my life. Because I miss him.
