V : Visitations
1981-82
Northern California and Oregon
hen you live in the same place for a long time and don’t have a chance to travel, it doesn’t occur to you that you’re in a place at all. You never see the edge of where you are to realize you’re in the middle of it. You don’t think, “Oh I’ve been living in Ohio,” until you get out of it.
I remember so clearly that first time I went to California, to see your older sister Jane. I arrived very late at night into San Francisco. Just as soon as we stepped outside the air was so different so cool and invigorating, then we were on the freeway, everyone driving so fast and the lights on the hillsides draped around in all directions, we drove across the Bay Bridge so high up above everything, I felt like I was crossing over into some other world entirely.
Jane lived at that time with the Italian boy from Michigan, Frank Murello his name was, and I liked him. Well everybody I met there was from somewhere else. New York, or the Midwest it seemed. I could never figure out why they weren’t at work all day, but they all seemed to have odd hours. They had a big old cedar-shingled house in the Berkeley Hills, which they shared with another couple, do you remember that place? Anyway, they lived together despite not being married. I didn’t object, why they were both plenty old enough, and I was used to you children going against the church by then.
First morning I woke up in the upstairs bedroom of that house; the sun was shining in and a soft wind was lifting up the curtains with a wonderful scent I had never known before. So I went to the window to look out into the yard and there was a jasmine vine, growing up the whole side of the house with huge white sprays like ruffles. Must have been early April. I had left our frozen yard in Ohio where there was barely a crocus poking up to this. And there was Jane down in the green grass in a nightgown, brushing out her wet blond hair, and shaking it out in the warming sun.
“Well good morning Lady Godiva,” I called down.
“Good morning Mom, you ready for some coffee, I’ll bring it up.”
“Now you don’t need to do that, I can come down soon as I pull myself together.”
Well no sooner did I start to dress than she was at the door with my breakfast tray, coffee, fresh croissants, giant strawberries, and little vase of that jasmine. Never will forget that. Such a lovely morning, and the light there so vivid and crisp, it seemed like another sun shone there altogether. Everywhere you looked there was something to see, hills everywhere. All the young people out walking, or running. No one ever sitting still. Getting away from home, from your dad and brothers lightened my spirits of course, but I hadn’t expected how beautiful it would be, I felt so free, like a girl again.
We spent some days looking at San Francisco, drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Mount Tamalpais. I’d never seen a view like the city of San Francisco from there, like a little toy model of white blocks on a green cloth.
I thought now in Ohio we never get what you would call a view at all. No high ground to look out from. I wonder if that makes people different, that they never get up and away enough to look back on where they are. Until they get to the point I’m at. But you know what I mean.
Well I didn’t know then that I’d be spending so much time visiting there in years to come, that I would have three children living there. But that first trip I never will forget because after that I had a picture of where you all were, and that was a comfort to me. I could go there in my mind and be closer to you.
You were living in Oregon at that time. Remember you drove down with your old friend Lisa, the one who sang in the all girl country band. The plan was to take me up to Oregon, so I could see Highway 1, and your place of course. Lisa had a big old red convertible I remember, she pulled right up to the front of the house and you both jumped out like rabbits, so excited about everything. We drove up Highway 1, taking the loop through the redwood trees. It surprised me the way those little pullouts off the highway put you right into the forest. We stepped out of the car into a circular grove of old redwood trees with sunbeams floating down through the spiraled branches like kaleidoscope, golden pollen hovering in the air. All somber and grand it was, a little like things are here. I’d never been in a forest like that, giant ferns everywhere and the ground so clear and soft underfoot with layers of needles and moss. Maybe quiet on account of the age of the trees, maybe time has a kind of weight, I don’t know. We didn’t even talk there, what could you say? Seemed like the inside of a church or cathedral, or did John Muir say that? Of course I had read John Muir, and Jack London, but somehow it didn’t prepare me for the size of things out West.
We started to pass the lumber mills up there near Eureka. Huge hills of bare logs all stacked up and waiting to be cut into lumber. And the mills there spewing steam, like they would boil and slice up the whole world if they could get their hands on it. Oh and not just one, but miles and miles of those stacks all lined up, the logs sorted by size, just waiting to be cut up. It seemed like enough lumber to build the world over again; boggled my mind that there ever could be that many trees in the world.
Well Ohio had been a huge forest before the settlers came, but it that had been 200 years ago. I thought how the felling of the forests had marched across the country until it got this far west and I was looking at the last of it. Which isn’t quite accurate I know, you have to account for the Great Plains but other than that it’s true. You were up in arms about the clear cutting they were doing up in Oregon. “They’re shaving whole mountain sides off and bulldozing the streams, just to get at the lumber.” And I said well of course they would, you can’t stop progress, if there’s a buck to be made someone will go take it. Sometimes I think you don’t have a practical bone in your body.
You said you were living in a cabin out in the country in the Coastal Mountains, but I couldn’t picture it. Lisa was from around there wasn’t she that was how you had found it? We went down a little winding mountain road through solid evergreen forest, big stands of Douglas fir and giant cedar, rivers every hundred yards. Was like following the Journals of Lewis and Clark. We turned into a valley lined with green pastures and evergreen hills rose up and spread along that side of the valley like a curtain.
We drove up a dirt driveway to your little wooden cabin; it sat on the hillside, with a little porch looking out, there was a white cat on the railing that jumped off. There was one room downstairs with a wood cook stove, and a ladder up to a sleeping loft.
“I’ll get the fire started,” you said, “and make some tea.” I thought well all this traveling and we haven’t progressed at all in these years. But that’s another story; oh I seem to be rambling here. Where was I ?
·
She keeps saying it’s Lisa’s twenty-fifth birthday we have to all get ready for the big party. I guess nobody here ever does go to a job. Been here two days and no one’s spoken of one. This morning I saw a couple of boys walking down the road carrying big machetes scared me half to death, turns out they were on their way to trim the Christmas trees in that field. Apparently you need to trim them fairly often, they all walk around with a big machetes, wonder they don’t cut their legs off. Party is to be in Jerry Cotswell’s pasture, wherever that is. I enjoyed meeting him last night. Big burly fellow in suspenders, merry blue eyes, everyone here looks like a character out of an old Western. Says he’s the great grandson of the man who originally settled the valley, came out here on the Oregon Trail. They have two or three homesteads dotted along the valley here small white houses and those immense silver barns. Told me he loves living here, never wants to live anywhere else. All these young people out here building little cabins in the mountains, growing gardens, one of the girls’ husbands does horse logging. Girls this morning talking about blackberry jam recipes it’s been some years since I heard that.
God how my parents tried to get away from all this and here they are. Stephanie gathered eggs for our breakfast from her chickens, wants me to come to the quilting bee at the WOW hall tomorrow. Woodsmen of the World, never heard of it before. Apparently every little town has a WOW hall. Oh those goats are bleating again, neighbor woman was milking them last night, makes cheese out of the milk. I didn’t trust the cheese she offered, none of it’s pasteurized of course. I don’t know what they have against having some convenience in their lives.
Seems this party is a big to do. Wants me to sit out here and spread some blankets out. They brought me a chair but I can sit on a blanket. Asked if I could help them set up the table but they seem to have plenty of people to help. People coming in from Corvallis, and Eugene and Newport, come for the whole day of course, and well once you drive that far. I’ve never seen so many VW vans in my life, and pickup trucks. Boys digging a pit to roast spareribs, have a whole pile of firewood there. Those other boys are setting up a raised stage at the edge of the meadow. I guess they’re the local band Ramblin Wrecks, she was all excited about them coming. Who’s watching those boys running barefoot through the meadow, now one of them’s on top of the barn, throwing sticks, he better come down from there those boys are up to no good I can tell. I see those other men smoking marijuana over there by that truck, that one with the beard looks like Moses, even older than me, well I’ll look the other way.
·
You were worried about what I might see as if I hadn’t seen all that before. During the Depression men used to smoke Jimson weed we called it. Though it was nice to have someone worrying about what I thought of things, not that anyone at home ever did. I think you found Oregon more unusual than I did; maybe there were parts I didn’t see. But you were eager to introduce me to everyone, like I was evidence of the New World or something.
“Steph is this your mom? Oh I am so happy to meet you. Did you come all the way from Ohio? Well your visit is just another reason to celebrate. I made my famous rhubarb pie, did you taste this homemade mead?”
“Mom this is Polly, OK honey I will.”
“You must be Stephanie’s mother. I’m glad you finally made it, she has been talking about you coming for the last month or two.”
“I know it’s awful rare that we get to visit.”
“Better get a plate before they’re all gone. I gathered this green salad from plants in the woods and make sure you taste that salsa and beans that’s Melon’s specialty.”
“What was your name dear?”
“I’m Melon, well Mary Ellen but they call me Melon.”
“What a nice shoulder bag you have, the needlework on that is just beautiful.”
“I got it in Oaxaca. We go down every winter. When it starts raining non-stop. You know.”
“Stephanie talks about you so much I thought I just had to come and meet you.”
“Well I’m glad you did.”
First time I can remember us sitting on a blanket together enjoying music, but you keep asking me if I need anything. What would I need? Wanted to sit and listen to a song, see something new in the world just like you do. Wanted to look and listen to where I was. Living out in the country is more like living always was everywhere. Maybe everybody does, feel less separated when they’re out on the land.
We ate from the long table of potluck dishes that were set out. Fresh greens, sorrel and lambs quarter gathered from the woods, lots of flowers in the salads, nasturtiums, borage, pansies; oh there was salmon, and crab and watermelon, brown rice and bean salad. Introduced me to some young man, who caught the salmon from his boat off the coast of Newport.
The afternoon wore on. The music kept playing, all you girls kept dancing; all dressed like gypsies spinning the little children around by their arms, gonna pull their arms out of the socket like that I thought. You were so excited for me to know about everyone you knew, trying to talk me into your world. I do recall that woman lived next door to Lisa, she came by to talk her name was Helena, fine boned and small, very shy. I gathered she was a Chicago heiress who had decided to be a hippie instead of a society matron. She had the goats and a little cheese shop in town; which sort of shocked her family in Chicago who owned a famous department store; but she never mentioned their name. If you met her you wouldn’t know where she came from, well she spoke nicely that was a clue, a course you don’t have to be poor to want to get away. Some years later she was the one gave Lisa her farm house then moved to France, was so generous to everyone you said, and then went one day went and drowned herself in a river like Virginia Woolf, put stones in the pocket of her rain coat and jumped off a bridge. Terrible tragedy. But that was some years later wasn’t it? Where was I?
It was nearing dusk. Your friend gave us her toddler to watch. A fat little boy named River, so she could go play her guitar with the band. Come sit, you said and the boy sat on your lap.
I always remember that day, it seemed like just one day when we were in the same field sitting together, and the springtime sun was warm. Watching the women dance, clapping the babies’ hands together.
I was happy maybe in a way you had never seen before, or remembered seeing, because we were away from what troubled us; there among children and music and the warm fresh air. Someone had just given us plastic glasses full of homemade beer, and we were laughing and singing on the blanket.
Tall tongues of orange flame shot out the loft door of the barn all at once. And a trail of black smoke went into the sky.
“Uh oh it looks like the barn is on fire!” I called out.
“Oh no it looks like the barn is on fire” and the call went out, everyone started to say, “The barn is on fire!”
“Where are the kids?”
“Tell the band to stop.”
“Find Terry and tell him.”
“Oh no, it’s catching the grass.”
“Quick get the hose.”
“The barn is on fire.”
There was running and shouting, mothers worried to find their children. I carried the baby toward the road. You ran to find Terry. In a few more minutes flames were licking out of the top of the barn. Somebody said to call the volunteer fire department, but it turned out they were mostly already there.
“The truck’s coming but it will take twenty minutes.”
“Make a bucket brigade, bucket brigade from the creek.”
For a while we stood in line and passed buckets to the man behind us. But there was no use. By now the flames were engulfing the barn and the new summer’s hay inside. The flames covered the outline of the barn perfectly neatly; walls of flame rising into the gathering darkness. The entire barn was sheathed in transparent orange flame.
There was not much anyone could do.
The fire swept across the field in places, where embers landed, sweeping here and there with the wind, we all scattered toward the road, the flames at our heels.
I held onto the baby, though I should have taken the blanket, it was a pretty old quilt, I should have grabbed it.
It was left behind and burned.
Sharon came to find me, “Oh my God I saw Stephanie and she didn’t have River I thought oh my God, but she said my Mom has him, thank you so much.”
She took the boy as if he had been in some terrible danger, of course I wouldn’t have let anything happen to a baby.
We stood and watched the flames continue with roaring and power enough to light the faces of those of us who sat in the field. Watching. Watching the glow spread to the green hills behind like the sun was setting a second time.
People stood in rows by their cars, or vans. Some packed up to leave. One mother was a little frantic; her boy was one of the older ones. The boys were found hiding in the woods. One of them had matches. No one said very much, once all the children were counted.
The roof fell in and a shower of sparks lit up the sky like a scarlet snow. It was still burning red and glowing when we went home.
What a shame we said. His grandfather’s barn; was the oldest building in the valley.
“Lucky he didn’t lose his house.”
“That’s for sure. Everything’s so dry.”
·
Seems like the warmth and happiness of that day, was connected to the fire somehow, burning down that beautiful old barn? Was like the impact of our two worlds meeting up sent up a spark that flew up and caught the nearest fuel to burning. I have often wondered what omen that was. Must our pleasure always be tainted with worry and loss?
Later that night we stepped out onto the porch and could still see the smoke curling up to the sky at the end of the valley. Very next morning, you woke up with a fever of 103 and I always thought it was some coincidence. Burning hot you were with a dry heat that seemed to be coming from deep inside, awful sick, looked like strep to me but we couldn’t get you to the doctor until the second day. Well when we finally got you in the clinic they took your temperature, had a fever of 104, said they didn’t see so many people who walked through the door with a fever that high, so I told them we came from Ohio where extremes of temperature were the norm. Oh they laughed. Turned out it was strep and that fever went so high that clumps of your hair fell out, you had terrible bald spots.
All our clothes, and the rooms smelled of smoke for days after that. As if we too had been through some fire.
·
Some years after that, there were five of you living out on the West Coast. Horace Greeley said ‘Go West Young Man.’ Well mine certainly did. My brother Jim said I had the most fiddle-footed crew he ever did see.
You didn’t come to Luke’s wedding in Portland when he married Martha, that was a nice affair. Your dad and I flew out for that. Then they had those two beautiful little girls looked just like Luke, blonde blue-eyed. Regan and Keely, they must have been five and six when she left Luke for the rock and roll drummer if you can imagine, told Luke he wasn’t exciting enough. Well the man worked as a carpenter laying floors all day, and he was tired when he got home; but she wanted to go out dancing. A’course the drummer left her after a few months and she went into a downward spiral, had to sell the house he had worked so hard to get for them, gained about 100 pounds, not to make snide comments about a woman’s weight but in her case. I don’t know what she was thinking, not thinking about anyone else that’s for sure. Never seen the like. And he never could get over her. Oh he kept talking for years how he thought they would be getting back together. I think he really loved her.
Seems to me hardly anybody gets what they deserve. Falls short one way or the other. Always something.
Around the same time your sister Jane married the famous symphony conductor and they got that house in the Hollywood Hills, that wonderful old Mediterranean style house, with balconies everywhere looking over the lights of the city. Huge place, and just the two of them in it. I never knew why Jane didn’t have any children, I guess as the oldest of ten she had enough of children. At any rate your father never liked to go and stay there you know because he worried Vladek, her husband, would think we were freeloading, or taking advantage of him. He didn’t like to be taken out to dinner to places he couldn’t afford to pay his share, he said, but I think his tremor embarrassed him too, that his hands shook at the table. A couple of times we did go but he was always uncomfortable.
Jane was certainly always generous with us. One day the doorbell rang and it was the UPS man with a big box for me. I wondered if it was a mistake because it wasn’t Christmas or my birthday and a big label from Saks Fifth Avenue on the carton. But I opened it and inside was the most beautiful hand stitched Italian nightgown and a floor length blue velour robe. Remember that robe? I wore it for years it was so warm. Well inadvertently the price tag had been left on and your sister Linda and I had to laugh, as the price equaled both our weekly paychecks combined.
But we were happy for her. Vladek was a good man, escaped the damn Communists in Poland and worked his way up in the business.
They built their place in Big Sur a few years later. Have to have two houses of course. Last place on earth I’d imagine living but it is so beautiful. Worried me to take children up there, one false move and somebody could go over the cliff. Well we talked once to her neighbor Ray the surfer. His house was sliding down the cliff into the ocean. Did you ever go down and look at that place. His doorway is all catawampus like a child’s drawing, and the garden he planted, grapefruit trees and all, can you imagine grapefruit trees, well they are about ten yards further away than they used to be. But he stays on.
Things were certainly easier for your father and me in our later years, once we retired. We were never rich mind you but he had a good pension from the county, and I had my Social Security so we could afford to travel a little and that’s where I was going with this. Big Sur.
What’s the name of that beach down the hills from where their place is? I know you used to go down there a lot. You and Jane were always close. Jane got married on that beach as I recall, we had the wedding party later in Hollywood but I think they had the actual ceremony right on that beach.
Pfeifer Beach, we took your son there when he was a baby. I remember that trip when I came, it was soon after he was born.
1994
San Francisco, California
I’m gonna call her up in San Francisco today. I wish she were married, don’t know why she doesn’t get married, if he is divorced, why they would want their child to be born out of wedlock is a shame, they seem to like each other. Well it’s not my business but I don’t want Aunt Marybelle to know, well she spreads the gossip all over town. Whole town will know. I could help her though if I go out there. Leave Earl here by himself. Linda comes over once a day from the County office around the block, she can check on him. They always got along better than anybody.
It’s her first and I never did really get to go stay with any of the girls when they were having babies. I’m seventy-four by God. Who was it in the Dickens story where the woman is doing the wrangle and had all the little children that she sort of ignores in order to take care of the orphan children, Ms. Wrangle? I’m gonna call her up.
“Hi it’s your mother.”
“Hi Mom.”
“Hi honey, I was trying to make some plans here, I’m thinking of coming to stay after you have the baby. I was planning I could come around April 30th,what do you think of that?”
“That’s great.”
“Plan to stay for two weeks. That alright?”
“Yes” you said, “of course.”
But you were worried, you had just gotten together with Paul, it would be more crowded. You worried that you would have to take care of me as well as the baby. You worried about my heart trouble, my trouble with stairs, about the long flight up from the sidewalk to your first floor Victorian. And you were worried about having such attention focused on you. We had never had the chance to talk for two weeks and it frightened you. When I got there you wouldn’t let me do much, I offered to cook.
“What do you mean you don’t know how to make a pot roast?”
“Well I never cook meat.”
“You need to eat some meat if you’re nursing, need the protein.”
We sat in the little garden that you had made out the back door. The back stairs to the two apartments above yours came down there. In a narrow strip of yard there was an avocado tree and lots of potted plants.
We were dressing him.
“Put the pretty clothes on him now because they grow so fast, you won’t get a chance to use them, they certainly won’t get worn out.”
We dressed him in a French-made white suit with a ruffled collar, there were small green leaves embroidered around the edge.
“You two could go out. I’ll keep him.”
“Maybe later.”
It was another day, we were in your kitchen eating burritos, you had bought around the corner.
“Let’s bathe the baby, bring him into the kitchen. I thought we could bathe him right here on the table.”
“Alright but I usually do it in the tub, but OK, I’ll bring the tub out there.”
“Well I thought I could help if we did it here on the table I can’t bend over too easy.”
He had a small blue hot water pad that was to be filled with warm water to lie on as we washed him so he stayed warm. You made the water awful hot I thought, thinking it would quickly cool off but it turned his skin pink.
“He’s awfully red honey I think you have the water too hot.”
“I think he is alright he likes it,” you turned him to see his warm red back, thinking that it was good if he could sweat.
I still thought it was too hot.
“Best to test it on your own skin first. I’ll finish up if you need to get some work done.”
“Alright.”
“Don’t you have some baby shampoo.”
“Yes here.”
“Always be careful of the ears, you don’t want to get water in his ears.”
The light came through the stained glass windows that covered the bottom panes of the two windows in the kitchen. The windows looked right into the neighbor’s little yard, where a woman named Maria grew herbs, she handed us a bunch of herbs one day, she said for stomach if we had any problems. The windows had a flower pattern of pink and yellow tulips against a background of green. All full of light.
I washed his head thoroughly with my expert attention, into the crevices of legs and buttocks.
“There, there, handsome boy, there, there.”
I took his two ankles in my old wrinkled hand and another hand expert behind his head and lifted him from the bath water. Then changed the old water to clear.
·
How many babies have I bathed, did it at the kitchen sink in later years, wrapped them in my apron as I took them out. A boy baby will urinate on you from the feel of the water or the cool air once they’re out you have to be careful, but they like the bath, because that’s where they’ve been the most in the warm water, they go back to where they came from.
I never saw a baby who didn’t like water. Course I want her to do it I don’t want to seem to take over anything, she needs to get confident herself. I enjoy this part as much as any, when there is the bath and cleaning and the wrapping up and then it’s done, for the child you’ve done what was needed. It’s so hard to do that as they get older, what they need is so ongoing or unfinished and not so close to hand. Not what can be worked out of an ear with a twisted corner of a washcloth, or smoothed over with some baby oil. Not the oil that you can massage into the scalp gently, mind the soft spot, to get rid of cradle cap, of course the bath does make me think of getting him baptized.
I do wish they were married. I could take him to a local church maybe some kind Mexican priest in the neighborhood would baptize him. I could stand in for him. I don’t remember who stood in for Stephanie. I wonder does soap remove the sacrament of water from the water. And then too I know in baptism the water is supposed to be running, so the soul is washed, washed in the blood of the lamb.
“Here little lambkin, so you like the bath, well yes, yes you do. Oh there’s a smile already.”
I would like him to be baptized to protect him, but I don’t know that he isn’t already. Maybe each child is baptized in the water of the womb, or getting born is baptism enough, from the darkness into the light. It is a painful journey isn’t it little one.
“Don’t you cry now. Is him cold?” A little more hot water there, there.
Babies cry when they’re cold, but they just cry too. They cry in the afternoon especially if it’s overcast. I’ve heard it from my ten, and fifteen grandchildren, for no reason you can find. They just cry I think for the general suffering in the world. They cry ahead of time at what’s in store for them. Just sounds like to me that they know it’s coming.
I don’t know about original sin. If it is there. And if it is, can it be taken away by the hands of a man the baby has never known? Not that there aren’t some holy priests, oh there are. I’m not contradicting the Pope. But if this fine boy has original sin well it might be that I’m the one to chase it out here with Ivory soap and water. Maybe don’t even need the soap. John baptized Jesus, not the other way around, to show that the power of grace rests in the common man. Or so I take it.
Maybe that’s the only kind of baptism there really is anyway, what some other human being can do for another with love and kindness, without our asking. That’s the real blessing not having to ask for it
I guess this child is my disciple. Child of my child. The resurrection of the flesh and the life of the world to come. Never truer words were spoken than that. All children are the life of the world to come.
See your eyes still stained with the blue of the sky or the robes of Mary mother of God. My tiny disciple I have flown a long distance to see you to know you so I could rub my big old hand here on your tiny chest; over your chest where I can feel your heart beat quick against the bones, beating like wings, like a moth that you catch in your hands to put outside, the strum and flutter of a moth cupped in two hands. The beating of your eager little heart. All children are eager. They are eager for life.
But there’s no hurry little one. No hurry.
The sacrament of baptism says we die into the water to be born into life everlasting. By joining Jesus in death, we join him in everlasting life; or that’s the catechism and it has a logic about it. If you need logic, well men need logic. That’s who thought that up. For a mother, now, logic doesn’t always answer what we see and know. A baby tells me children are where you find everlasting life and that’s where they came from.
Maybe every woman’s womb is the cave where Christ was laid to rest, to rise again, I have always thought but must never say, such a sacrilege.
“What blue eyes you have, little man, what blue eyes.”
“Oh it isn’t raining rain you know, it’s raining violets isn’t it yes, it is.”
Well it also says in the catechism if there is no priest around and you are a Christian you can baptize by reciting the Trinitarian formula. Can’t hurt. Over the forehead three cupfuls, I hope it doesn’t matter that it’s poured from a blue plastic cup.
The first one, I baptize you in the name of the Father, another, in the name of the Son, don’t cry now, in the name of the Holy Ghost, amen. I’ll anoint his head here on the temples, as Christ was the anointed one, now you are like him, marked with chrism of the chosen.
Try to get the lid off that calendula oil without letting go. I don’t want to let go.
Three cups of water, and the oil, now you are baptized.
What is this original sin anyway, just some man saying that what comes from a woman can’t be all perfect. God just being jealous he can’t have babies himself. Original sin I don’t know. I think that those of us here on the earth already when the babies come are the original sin, the sin they come into. And it can’t be cut, not like the umbilical cord is cut at birth, the cord that carries blood and oxygen between the two of us, maybe cutting that is the original sin. The theologians say that original sin represents our share of human suffering except that that would make it seem there was an equality to the suffering and we know that’s not true.
2002
Blanchardville
Was always a sadness to have my grandchildren so far away. Remember you came to Ohio to fetch me that one year. Your sister Carrie wanted me to come out to Sacramento for her daughter’s first communion. It was March I think. Not a good month anywhere. Well she had to work and I wasn’t well enough by then to travel on my own so you came to Ohio to fly back with me. For some reason, even before you arrived back you were a nervous wreck and I couldn’t find any reason for it. You didn’t have too many children, I think and you didn’t work too much, you were doing freelance work. I wondered if I made you nervous for some reason, but you said it was just that Paul didn’t have work and so on. But it occurred to me that you didn’t have anyone to talk to close by, I mean no one who really knew you. No one very close except your husband, and that’s always fraught.
Anyway you were helping me pack. You were helping me pack as if the two of us could be taking off to somewhere new and better, even if I was just going to visit my daughter who lived a few hours from you. We sat upstairs in my room.
“Well get the middle sized suitcase out of the hall closet where your dad kept it.” He was gone by then.
“Oh maybe I’ll need the larger one if I’m to stay two weeks.”
I opened the door and you took it out of the dark where a few of Rusty’s old sweaters were still hanging, I had given most of them away but it seemed wrong to give them all away, just in case. Just in case what he needed them? I don’t know.
In my room we opened the suitcase and put it on the floor.
“Now let’s see. What do I have hanging there?”
“You want your blue suit?”
“Guess I better take that for church huh.”
“It’s nice.”
“Then honey can you get down there and find the navy shoes, that go with that, they’re just sling back, those are they.”
“How cold is it there now?”
“It varies, its warmer in Sacramento than San Francisco.”
“I know it is. Well get that green pantsuit out for me will you. The cotton one. There’s a sweater that goes with it. Do you see it? Would you like any of those blouses hanging there, please take some I have so many.
“No Mom I don’t need them.”
“Well I have too many things. I want to get rid of things.”
I was packing to go to California where I was going to visit but it occurred to me that you were doing the same. You weren’t going home there any more than I was.
·
How long have you lived in San Francisco now, and I wonder why you still don’t feel at home there. Oh I was awful worried about you after the quake of ‘89. Sat all evening watching on TV and not knowing how or where you were, and other people calling and asking me “How’s Stephanie?” and I’m saying “I haven’t heard, I haven’t heard”. You were living alone then, it was before you met Paul and I thought well who’s going to know if you’re OK or not? Sure there are corners and blocks that are familiar like that one at Twenty-second and Mission but they’re not yours. That Victorian apartment building in the Mission, fifteen years you lived there. It’s fresh painted now, but still white, the two flats on each floor with the black wrought iron railings winding along the stairway in the middle. There are dozens just like it in the city, and the only thing different is your memory of what happened there.
Wonder how fifteen years you could live and a child raised there but not any sign of that now, or of the curtains with blue sailboats that hung there when he was small or his little hand pulling them aside to peer down at the sidewalk where his father might be coming home. Not a soul who knows you there now, isn’t that strange, and a whole city like that, or a country where people’s memories are left behind in places they never see?
San Francisco especially, I think, it being so hemmed in by water doesn’t blend away at its edges into the countryside like Ohio towns but drops away to the bay or the ocean. Was it ever your home, though you live there still? Well you spent some years away in New York, in Africa, but you keep going back to San Francisco, so I wonder what you find there.
·
Turns out you had been in the publishing office down near Jackson Square, directing a photographer how to photograph the baseball game when all the sudden the building shook and shook the red brick walls, and after the shaking that went on and on there was a thin red cloud hung in the air. And then the handsome young husband of one of the girls you worked with ran into the office and took her in his arms saying “Natalie, Natalie you’re OK.” He worked further down Montgomery Street in the Wells Fargo building, and in the minutes after the quake he had run down ten flights of stairs and run at full speed up the crowded street. But no one was to come and look for you, you felt that sharply. No one even asked how you were getting home, your own fault for always seeming so capable. And so you went through the streets. “Through half deserted streets and muttering retreats”, well it wasn’t a wasteland but that comes to mind.
You walked outside and so many windows had shattered, was like a sprinkling of snowfall of glass on the streets but not much more really a few fallen bricks here and there. Passersby said they were closing off Market Street, they said not to walk down Market, and so you went up through North Beach to Telegraph Hill, then up Nob Hill, where groups of frightened tourists were standing in the square, they’d been evacuated from their fancy hotel rooms and were bunched together and afraid to move while waiters from the Mark Hopkins served iced drinks from trays.
Sirens whined in the distance. You kept walking, uphill and down across the city, then turned down Polk Street.
Only the addicts went on with their normal lives, sleeping in urined doorways, dreaming of older disasters then this one. You passed a narrow apartment building where some years earlier a boy named Brad had lived, he was a good poet but took heroin too, you had spent a few nights with him there in that building, and the memory found you as you walked by. Storekeepers stood in front of their shops watching; radios played. You stopped in a corner-store for a bottle of water, there was no power inside it was dark, the Indian man couldn’t open his cash register, he showed you by gesture, he didn’t speak English, but you gave him a dollar he gave you the change, his fingers touched the palm of your hand. It was calm in the dim shadows you stood and took a drink of cold water.
A few blocks more, then the golden dome of City Hall rose into view, shining bright over the Civic Center square where the network news trucks were clustered like giant insects, with antennae and flashing lights for eyes. You stepped carefully over the thick black cables that led to the cameras that were broadcasting images of your besieged city to my living room in Ohio, but still I could not find you or know if you were alright who walked past the cameras unnoted, past the noise of what is broadcast into the silent obscure story of your own going-onward walking.
Thinking, I am a woman walking home, if my home is not there I’ll keep walking until I can stop somewhere. The wooden building on Duboce you had just moved into was likely to be fine, you thought. It was. It was all fine. You got home and called me to say you were all right, since you knew I’d be worried.
·
After you were married and lived in the Mission you had such a beautiful garden; all kinds of flowers, jasmine, bougainvillea, avocado trees out back. You told it had been paved over soon after you left. That’s what a city is I guess, layers on layers of events and memory covered over and accumulating, depending on how far back you want to go of course. That block where you lived was the end of the streetcar lines in the early 1900’s there were stables all around. One still stood on the corner, below that big blue Victorian, now rented out for cars. You can trace the circular turn around tracks left in the cobblestones there, and if you kept going back tracing what had been covered over you would get to Mission Creek that flowed a few blocks north where Mariposa runs now, where the butterflies came to drink.
·
It’s not just what’s covered, it’s the way things go on just as they always have that covers us over too, things that happen whether we’re there or not. Remember when Dad and I were visiting one spring and came to the Carnival Parade that passes on Twenty-fourth Street. We all walked down there from your place on Twenty-second, oh that was quite a show all those feathers and sequins I’ve never seen the like, and of course your father liked the naked girls on those trucks,.
“Oh that sure was something,” he said as we walked back to your flat.
Mexican fruit stand around the block where you went is still there too, I went with you there sometimes, Maria’s Frutas y Verduras, right on South Van Ness, always sort of dark and dingy in there but you could buy warm tortillas and tomatillos with the light green skins still on like paper, and strawberries in bulk, Maria herself there in her high heels and makeup every day, “Oh que lindo nino,” when she sees your little blond boy.
He wants a helado from the cooler, strawberry too, milky and fruity at the same time, always a fresh bunch of cilantro just for the smell, good on eggs.
But now someone else lives there. You never even walk down that block, why would you. Maybe on occasion you pass close by on the way across town and it seems for a second that you’re going home but you’re not. Yet there’s something of you that’s left there, as time is always left in some place, believe me I am in a position to know about this. You leave some of your life as leaves are left on the ground under a tree. Mornings playing with your baby son, the first heat of your marriage, the white rabbit that you kept in the garden. Now if that place were always in your life, even if you didn’t live there anymore, why, you’d come back to it, or someone you knew might live there and that time would be near, not hidden from your notice. There is always something we leave.
So many places you left. First place you lived in the city on Ashbury Street at Frederick, you can barely pick that one out anymore. A big three-storey Victorian, the ones around it look exactly like it. 17th and Arkansas, so many nights there with the boy before Paul. Had a back wooden stairway, rickety stairs a slanted wooden floor, the smell of the Anchor Steam plant, its sour barley mash cooking through the neighborhood air, birds would flock to the empty baseball diamond there. To get to work downtown you would take the bus along 3rd Street before it was developed into condos, the big concrete factory was there and the rusted ruins of the pier, and rotting hulks of ships left from the war. Later your son went to nursery school across the street, and so you played in the park there with him, on that same corner and a hundred other places but none of them really yours, or any more.
·
And when you were in all those other places, in India, in Morocco, Spain what did you find? You found Leila, for one. Your brightest high school student in Morocco had a sister and her mother lived in that little university town there. And her father came and went from Paris, had other wives, was planning that Leila with her English and French and degrees would help his businesses grow, but she did not want to leave her mother did she. And what advice did you give her? Her mother who spoke only Berber who could not read or write, in her djellaba and scarf whom the girls were almost embarrassed for in public, you drove them to the wool souk one day, you saw how it was, how they were all so tender with one another laughing, touching. So Leila asked you if it was worth it to go to Paris, to leave that unwritten language her mother spoke. And what did you tell her? Leila was not a fool, she saw further than most. Saw that the love she wanted and acceptance was there already. Go across the world and meet yourself. Do you ever keep in touch with her?
·
Wasn’t the last time, but almost the last time we spoke on the phone you were in the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Way up at the top of the range a mountain called Jebel Toubkal, all snowed in, there was an old casbah, dark brown stucco building covered with snow, had been a military lookout now a hotel of course, mules met you at the foot of the hill and carried your bags up, it was Christmas Day. No cell phone service, there was a telephone in a little wooden booth by the gatehouse, a phone booth and an old man who attended it, didn’t speak any language you knew. He was toothless, his skeleton fingers were stained with something blue. You were putting coins in and they were clanking right out through the bottom, but he helped you. Showed you that each coin needed to be warmed by rubbing on his dirt-blackened coat then blown on with his warm breath, then put in the slot to keep my voice there. Hello Mom, its Stephanie. Merry Christmas we are in the mountains you said. But what you couldn’t explain was how in the building down the hill a little boy with a stick sang as he tried to herd his cow into the stable under their house where the animals were kept for warmth. Or how the toothless old man was helping you with his gnarled hands and the breath from his toothless mouth--working frantically to help you as if he sensed the distance you had to go. I couldn’t smell the charcoal cooking fires starting up for lunch in the street below or see the two young girls with long black hair, with a blue robe around them, their horse was white like the snow that fell around them and when they saw you they pointed and laughed then galloped into the mountain pass. The old man kissed more coins with his wheezing breath and you put the coins in the slot, each time one fell I could hear it. I was sitting on the couch over at Linda’s house watching reruns of Upstairs Downstairs.
So now you live in San Francisco again, in the Outer Sunset. Course you never would settle just for the Sunset, have to be the Outer. Now you’ve gone as far as you can in that half of the world, put yourself right up against the edge, a bleak block from the ocean and it is never out of your hearing. Well does that make you feel better? Having gotten to the very quivering end of this country you are from the middle of.
·
I’m trying to think now how old you were when your father finally stopped drinking. Thirteen or fourteen I guess. He started selling hearing aids during the day and working at the courthouse as the maintenance manager, at night. You could drive down Main Street after dark, see John Hancock’s statue standing there on top of the big gold dome of the courthouse. See all the lights glowing in the windows and your father’s silhouette, mopping floors and waxing and buffing the hallways between the judge’s chambers.
Used to have his dinner and then go in. From seven to ten, I think something like that. Fact that it was at night meant no one had to see him do it, and that saved his pride. He hated wearing that uniform, because he had always been such a fancy dresser and now wore that green uniform shirt with his name written above the pocket, carried a big bunch of keys on a ring. He didn’t mind the work so much as you’d think. Would come home and brag about how shiny he got the hallway floors in the courthouse with his new buffer. The hearing aid sales weren’t so reliable, he always joked because most of his customers couldn’t hear what he was saying to begin with. You’re selling what?
You know how bad his hearing was. Like his mother Hazel, she didn’t hear a word anybody said for the last twenty years of her life, she just sat in her rocking chair nodding and smiling regardless of what you said. You kids used to tease her say “Grandma Luke’s been run over by a car!” and she would say “Well isn’t that nice!”
Made communication such a chore.
I have to say your father got some determination somewhere and just decided to quit drinking. I don’t know what changed exactly. He saw his last son growing up, thought he had one more chance with that son and that did it somehow. Said I’m quitting and he did. He started working two jobs and finally the city offered him a job managing the city landfill. Well I know, not a very glamorous position by the sound of it but he liked it. He ran the office, took the money, kept the books.
He drove us out there one time you were visiting. It’s out on County Road 214, out by Trenton Ridge. You asked him how he knew which road to turn at amid the endless grid of brown stubble fields and empty farmhouses, but he knew, had known those roads his whole life. He drove and talked.
“There’s a lot more to it than digging a hole in the ground and filling it up. A lot of engineering goes into how to get all that stuff into the earth, back into the ground. Landfill is what you have to have when life progresses, progress goes on and things are used up and discarded. They have to go somewhere. Even after you don’t want it or it doesn’t work anymore there is still the thing itself. The problem of the weight and shape of the material thing itself, you can’t just wave a magic wand and get rid of it. It’s gotta go somewhere. And we make it a place to go. It’s a principle you can apply to different areas.”
There was a green corrugated metal building near the entrance where the trucks pull up to check in. He sat behind the window that slid open, to have them drive onto the scale, take the money, give them a receipt. Cost depends on the size of the truck, the number of axles. You got to ask each trucker if any of them has hazardous waste because that costs extra, and has to be put in a different place.
“The hell of it is, a lot of them hide the hazardous stuff down in the bottom of the truck, then say oh no we don’t have anything hazardous. Course then they dump stuff out and there it is, well that kind of thing, asbestos, what have you, can poison the ground water and you have a mess on your hands.
“You have to watch out for fire. A fire burning under there could go on for weeks. Have a big problem on your hands. That’s why you can’t put rubber tires in.
“The Cats dig a big hole, as if you’re making a lake almost, now the thing is you can’t have the dozers tipping over, and it’s hard to keep a smooth edge to it. First you need to excavate a big area. Couple of times you’ll hit a pocket of natural gas, or even a water spring. They’re all over. You’d be surprised. But that’s just the start of it. I’m in charge of which holes should be filled in and when it’s time to dig another.”
We stood there at the office as the noise of the trucks and the scrape of the giant bulldozers drowned out the sound of his voice trying to explain.
“See how the layers are spread down and then the bulldozers drive over, and then the compacters. You have to fill in with sand sometimes to get it smooth. Now take a guess how many cubic feet of material we get into one of these pits, 1 million. Can you believe that?” We all feigned interest to the degree that we could.
“Eventually if all goes well, after forty or fifty years you’ll be able to grow corn over the top again. But it takes a while.”
We used to kid him when he got up to go to work, we’d say to the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump. You wouldn’t think it, because it was only digging holes and filling them up, but he loved that job, it had the shape of a grand big undertaking that he had always looked for somehow, had machinery and action on a large scale. He did that for about six years, driving out on the slippery county roads in the dark to get there by 7:30 a.m.
After being the hero on the football field, and then the battlefield, was like he was always looking for something grand; some great American undertaking, some grandiose project involving vast miles of land and machinery, something of depth and complex layers, something that would never end and always be needed and he found all that at the county landfill.