March 2011 Vacation in Playa del Carmen, Part 1

I wasn't worried, but neither was I sure I wouldn't go totally crackers from the heat and heavy memories of all the years living as we did in Mexico. I am on vacation, after all. It's nothing but a party if you can leave. Humidity has an odor, like wet concrete, pork always sizzling somwhere on a plancha, chemical cleanliness hovering close to the density of jungle, never far away. Scented fever dreams make amends and I can be healed whole. Not without sadness and anxiety, but what adult can go anywhere without nostalgia wringing her heart in her hands, mingling desire and gladness from the past with strains of death and ghosts of who we had become without intent. Today, I put on my bathing suit and swam in the turquoise drift. I fought the current close to shore and finally surrendered, floating on my back but still kicking my fins like a siren whose song is always sinking like a stone.

Reconciling

patterns, habits of mind and current behavior. the implicit and explicit memory. it's time to do the work.

Most of the Time

Most of the time
I can't tell if I'm already ending
or just about to begin.

This age is weighing heavy;
so much grief has happened,
while much is left unseen.

Though there are moments
when hope tells of happiness
I am as yet unable to conceive.

About Deb

She was fifty, on or about her death. She had been a teacher, but mostly a mother and housewife.

By the end of my life, if all goes well, she will have only seen a fraction of who I am .

Deb was dead when he found her on the bathroom floor, we just didn’t want to know it yet.

We waited in the room designed for patience, not much more than a hallway, a bright white space at Yale New Haven Hospital. For five days, we prayed silently and separately, and back in my dorm room I asserted her ultimate survival. I had no mental language for the possibility of a motherless world. When the phone rang I knew what was I was being told even though what was being said was babble. I remember wearing a red tank top and walking downtown. But would I really have been alone then? Next my father gripped me as I gasped over him telling me it was time to pull the plug, there was wailing in the grieving room. Old Josephine, young Christine. Chick and I. we walked around the hedge that went around the building where we ended my mother’s braindead suffering, if she was suffering, or if all that had already ended before decision time. I elected not to see her in the hospital bed. I wish I hadn’t seen her face in the coffin, those horrible hands, waxen and caked with covergirl.

She has not an age or occupation, only in my memory she lives and is busy keeping us. We left her for dead - when she was fifty - on the bathroom floor of our house. The last time we got out alive.

Ash Wednesday (TS Eliot)

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

Quoth Thomas Merton

Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life/and life to thought/in such a way that we are always growing,/always experiencing new things in the old/and old things in the new./Thus life is always new.

The Earliest Ending of Winter

Probably it will snow again. Today, though, it rains and spring seems inevitable, if not willing. And suddenly everything looked different again, warm air descending onto brick and broken shufflers, bringinghome bags from shopping. it's an atmospheric alteration and I wish I could quantify this sense that it affects my percetion and mood. But what would be the fun in that? If I am making steps they are so small as to be imperceptible to anyone but myself, but I've applied to something and started reading two new books. I spoke to my grandmother, who is lonely. There is water everywhere, a safe deluge for changes and harbingering. Auspicious enough without birds. Endings are happening to begin.

J Crew Haiku

shorts shopping in March
thrilling and terrifying
spring brings white fat thighs

A Beautiful Afternoon

It was spring. Or late summer. We were on found time, as usual. There wasn't anyone else around. I was wearing sandals; I know this because they broke, and this fact is a critical element of the story. It was a beautiful afternoon. I know this, because I remember it fondly. We were in Milford, at a beach recently discovered.

The tide, like all tides, comes and goes, according to its own will or plan, or by the coersion of the moon, but we don't always see with our eyes the world as it happens. We had walked out to a rocky island, a very Connecticut spit of land. To get there was easy, the return more trecherous. This isn't meant to be poetic, simply what occured. A jetty connected one shore and the other, more tenuous sand. Once around we went, laughing, I would imagine, as that is what we normally do. And when we came back to the point of departure, we realized we would have to move fast. It was getting late, and worse, the water was rising. But my sandal had snapped and Malcolm had to carry me, never an easy burden.

It was sandal season. But a month when you want a sweater come late afternoon. We were young and in love and harmlessly reckless. There was betrayal in our near future, death in the distance, and travel to foreign destinies in the space between. We didn't know any of that then. A liminal afternoon at a beach is now is an axis for other more memorable events, and yet, this moment seems important enough to recall from the depths of my contray memory many years into the present. I'm always wishing it were another place in time.

The Last Good Days in Mexico

• we had just bought the low rider honda (civic?) with cigarette and burgundy interior; it felt both safe and familiar, compared with the expletive jeep. I burned a beatles cd and drove somewhere by myself, just because I could without fear of breaking down. I listened to "I've just seen a face" over and over and sang out the windows, into the wind and palms.
• we took missy out on the boat, in the morning, before work. we trolled away from civilization, toward Sisal if you travel far enough. The water was flat, almost glassy and we each smiled in our own direction, riding parallel with shore and horizon. Eventually, malcolm tangled us in mangroves, and we thought we might ge stuck. but we weren't.
• swimming to the pier and back, completely boyant in the absurdly salty Gulf. overhead birds. dogs on the shore, standing sentry. in the near distance, our charming ruin of a house, steps digging into the strand. nowhere and everywhere, happy to be floating with practice.
• walking single file on the uneven sidewalks of centro, under the direct heat of a despot sun, peering inside dusty American renovations and the damp coca cola courtyards of families who count generations in threes. among simultaneous building and crumbling, there is a permanence.

something's always wrong

don't worry, it's only the title of a catchy toad the wet sprocket song - no, not the one playing during rayanne graff's meltdown - the other one. the mellow one. I wish that was my nom de guerre. I wouldn't like to go to war, but I would like a reason to fight. I feel so tired. looking for something to love as everything I have been doing seems pointless, dull, and not a welcome space for me to unfold. I just have to keep at it, in spite of myself. it's the only thing I can think of, besides that other thing, which we all know isn't a good idea at all. more books and baking, baths and bedknobs.*

*ran out of uplifting, soothing, elegant lady b-words.

blowmonkeys, bildungsromans, bayonets, bindis, buskers, berliners, ballyhoos, bangarangs, blood-diamonds, bananagrams, bales, christian

the end.