We live in the southernmost corner of the West Edge on a cul-de sac street that runs down a ridge between two canyons. If I walk up the hill to the end of our block, I can see the Pacific Ocean way off in the distance, and I can drive to the Mexican border in half an hour.
The sun comes up a little later here at Casa de Swell than it did when we lived a few miles west on the coast, or it seems that way to me. The house and garden are snugged into a steep hill to the east with more and taller hills further on until the land drops to the desert and California slides into Arizona. The sun has to climb high, high before it’s visible, and by then it’s thrown a lot of light at whatever is in the sky that morning, taking its time. It has all day, after all. Things dance to a sunrise.
The sun sets in the ocean, of course, plunk, like a penny in a fountain, there one second and not the next, its trumpeting, dying day flaming against whatever clouds are around a minute or two later: blood orange and ‘seventies hot pants pink that darkens to purple sky and indigo sea. Gaudy Vegas women, the sunsets here.
Sunrises are softer. The glare-y bit doesn’t last as long and isn’t as blinding, as face-burning hot. Dialed down, the nuclear fusion is just getting started, not flinging molten lava solar flares around just yet. A flare is not lava, you know; it just looks like that in pictures. It’s not a thing even, like boiling iron or even boiling gas; it’s an explosion of electromagnetic radiation that shows up in radio waves and x-rays and gamma rays. How telescopes can see a picture of something – spewing, arcing lava-like stuff that breaks like a wave and drops in hot drabs, falling back to the sunsea – a picture of something that isn’t a solid or liquid or gas I can’t imagine. So I skip the science class and imagine the clouds are feeling the warmth and changing colors in response, like toast that browns under the glowing coil, flowers that open to catch it, hold it.
People are gaga for sunsets. When we lived a block from the beach we saw them every day, walking in front of the house and across the street, heading west like tan zombies to stand on the bluff for a few minutes as the round sun flattened and drowned on the horizon. Sometimes we went too and stood in the jagged line above the sand and sandstone, everyone’s west-facing skin golden and lit like watchers at a campfire. The temperature drops noticeably when it’s over; a thin chill seeps off the water and wraps your ankles. Time to go. It’ll be dark soon.
I like sunrises more, and mornings and coffee. I like things at the start of the day, people stirring, eyes opening, sleepy smiles at what’s ahead. There have been enough endings in my life recently; I’ll stick with beginnings.
We are coming up on Highest Fire Threat time, mid- to late October. Since I wrote the piece below we have lived through almost five late summers, thick with heat, and one terrible wind-driven blaze that charred the canyon black just across the street from our driveway, the one I described so cheerily back in 2011. My brother, whose story crept into this narrative, died, as most of you know, the following spring. The oppressive weather of September and October used to make me bitchy and angry. Now this semi-season grows a tumor of dread in my belly; fear rolls off me like sweat; I start at sudden sounds. Sometimes I read this piece to remember how it began, when I realized I could control only the small, unimportant things.
Thursday, 9.8.11
Some guy at the power substation in Yuma, AZ flipped the wrong switch and most of the lower third of the Great State of California and four million people of its people are powerless. Maybe he should have been thinking about the grid instead of that woman in HR with the nice ass. And why did he have to do it today when I am itching to write in a way I have been longing to itch for weeks, this afternoon when I am riding full tilt in the Word Funnel, phrases and ideas swirling in my head, waiting to blow out the little end onto a virtual page, lines and squiggles in Book Antigua?
No matter, said Ms. Efficient, gathering hurricanes and candles, log lighter, matches and many, many flashlights, congratulating herself for grilling an extra-large steak last night (just in case Yuma Guy was thinking with his penis today? did she know?) and not being out of romaine, as usual. Dinner, handled. Last half-gallon of milk in the freezer ice bin for morning coffee and don’t open the door ‘til then. It is a freaking sauna in this house – open the windows here and down the hall to try to achieve the miracle that is cross-ventilation.
When Tom pulls up the drive, I’m out there in the Mini with the engine running and two chargers plugged in, juicing my cell and iPad, singing to The Wreckers with the air-conditioner cranked and a full tank of gas. He frowns, puzzled, at my cheery wave. Making the best of things, I say, all charged up.
Once in his home team uniform of shorts and ratty tee, he hands me his soggy suit coat and slacks. What did you do, I ask, swim home? No, he explains, but he was in the lobby of the office building when the power went out, so he walked up 20 flights to where his clients were waiting for him, then back down 20 when the guard said the emergency lights in the stairwell were shutting off in half an hour. He’s a wet, tired, 80-year-old Energizer bunny who deserves a big glass of wine.
We eat outside in the gathering gloom (as the Moody Blues sang), whispering about how far sound travels in this spooky quiet. A neighbor across the canyon out back, a quarter mile away, talking. Coyotes far down the canyon, yipping and laughing. The faintest hum – can you hear that? – that we finally agree is the sound of cars on the interstate six miles west. The air is thick and hot. Night has fallen hard to the dark ground. The tea lights are guttering. A mosquito bites and Tom’s palm slaps skin. Inside.
He tucks into the guest room because I want to write. Besides, he thinks he hears more coyotes over there, though I know better. He’s asleep in seconds, his breathing a bellows that sucks air out of the hall. I blow out the candles like a birthday girl and follow the last one, held in my hand like Tinkerbelle in a jar, down another leg of the hacienda to our bedroom.
I build a light fort with flashlights balanced on furniture and sit in my underwear where the beams intersect on the bed, legs flat out and a fat feather pillow scrunched between my thighs, in the vee, iPad on top. My fastest-typist-in-the-class fingers are flying on its pretend keyboard, not tapping because the only sound is a minute skin-glass thud, maybe a thid, a thip, a tip – tip tip tip tip, they run together, it’s so fast, words are shooting out my fingerprints, nanopauses here, there. I hear a coyote just outside, a bark, another, and I look up.
Where the light beams cross on the bed is a campfire. The black-ink corners of the room are the night, and the walls have fallen away, leaving me under a sky of glitter and silence and a three-quarter moon that begs for an ululating howl. The coyote obliges, and then her friend nearby, calling, calling. So I answer, straightened back, chin up, whispering aaaah-rooooo, the same note, held, the lyric to a coyote tune.
A Paul Simon song from yesterday bounces into my head, and I remember the words:
“A pilgrim on a pilgrimage
Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge
His sneakers torn
In the hour when the homeless move their cardboard blankets
And the new day is born.”
Writing songs would be so hard, the music part especially might as well just be impossible and then fitting words to its melody, and then rhyming, for Pete’s sake, and not just moon and June but verses that are so good you can’t forget them, not ever, like:
“Folded in his backpack pocket
The questions that he copied from his heart
Who am I in this lonely world?
And where will I make my bed tonight?
When twilight turns to dark.”
“Questions for the angels
Who believes in angels?
Fools do
Fools and pilgrims all over the world.”
My brother had cancer, you know, and now he has more cancer. I wasn’t writing about that, not on the night the lights went out and not today before this, but now I guess I am. The surgeons cut it out, a lot of it, all of it (we thought), chunks of his neck and arm, big meaty pieces that left one hand quivering and his voice as scratchy as an old 45, twisting scars like long gristle rivers that cross craters covered with skin. Tiny dots on a PET scan, some new things or maybe some old things a knife or the poison missed, who knows, no one, no one does, but there they are. More cutting soon, maybe with lasers this time. He’ll be fine. He will. He says and I believe. I don’t believe in angels, fool and even pilgrim that I am, but I believe him. Maybe. Maybe he’s an angel.
But that night I was just thinking that if I wrote more and more, tip tip tipped more words, thousands of words onto the lighted page, that every once in a while some phrase would stick, like “questions that he copied from his heart” does, would strike the inside of a tiny brass owl and make an almost imperceptible sound and be remembered by someone for a little while even without an accompanying string of notes.
That night I was sitting at my campfire in the arms of the intense silence of a powerless night, in a darkness that came from the bottom of the lightless ocean and colored everything invisible for hundreds of miles, blotted it out, wondering how Simon had thought of rhyming “disappear” and “zebra tear,” listening to Tom breathe and the coyotes cough. Until I yawned one last time and clicked off the flashlights, pulled a sheet over my hot legs and lay my sweaty head down to sleep.
By morning power had been restored and everything was just as it had been before.
“If every human on the planet and all the buildings on it
Should disappear
Would a zebra grazing in the African Savannah
Care enough to shed one zebra tear?
“Questions for the angels
Who believes in angels?”
I mean, it is, but my name here is Rosie North, traveler and teller of truths, woman of history and mystery, former stealer of kisses, steeler of backbone, hater of flying insects except the pretty ones.
Here I may still look like that woman with the bared arms and blue headscarf in the cartoon avatar. Here, if I've a mind to, I can print that in color and tape it to every mirror. Or I, as Rosie, can be wizened, learning scratched deep in my skin, every cigarette and snort recorded. I can cry and choke on sobs, wipe my hot, snotty face with my shirt. Rosie will take a deep breath and fix those blue eyes on you and tell what happened, who's guilty and who's not.
Not some smudged version of the story, details erased and names changed because -- shhh! -- someone might read it and tell You-Know-Who or because some-one-or-more is taking notes and keeping score or someone's jealous or a Big L for Lifelong loser or is wearing the Can't Get Over It hat.
Besides my brief but bad Husband #1 sliming my lovely website, there were Watchers. And Tattlers, like in first grade. Even Nora Ephron, who said her mother taught her that life is copy, had to stop telling stories about a family member who saw them as humiliating instead of funny. Some of my step-relatives were mightily offended by subjects I wrote about, and there were so effing many of them - step-relatives and Subjects Now Off Limits - that the walls of the box I was writing in started chafing my elbows and pressing down on the top of my head. It got so bad that one person bitched that I wrote too glowingly about my own kid and her kid, claiming I did it just to make Complainer look bad by comparison. As if Complainer needs help in that endeavor.
I started writing four years ago to say what needed saying, to put what I had lived and what I knew and how it felt into words for people to read, because it feels great to write, to tell stories, to get it off my chest, whatever. BecauseI wanted to. I didn't do it to find myself in a cell, certainly not one made by people I'd cross off my Contacts list in a nanosecond if it weren't for the unhappy accident of their births.
The New York Times had a long, lovely article in yesterday's Sunday edition about Linda Ronstadt. She has written a book that will be out soon, and in it she talks about the recent news that she has Parkinson's and can't sing, her musical career from beginning to end, the things she did along the way. She lives in San Francisco and has two kids, 19 and 22 years old who, one presumes, can read. About drugs, she admits to trying everything and using so much cocaine that she had to have her nose cauterized twice. Ms. Ronstadt is only a few years older than a white-haired writer I once knew, who was afraid to tell stories like that because doing so would have cost her dearly.
