Paradise Imagined

    If I could have it any way, if I could have it anyway.  I'll get up at daybreak in Honduras, walk into the turquoise water—naked—and float, then swim, be strong enough to swim for hours, to dive under without the snorkel, to weave between the coral reefs, watch the garden crusted caves where purple red and yellow fish peek out from hidden recesses then slide back inside, like a magician’s trick, they play hide and seek, their bubbles and mine float up, silver beads broken from a bracelet. Tiny fishes, looping banners of silver, streak toward me and then pass between my legs, across my silhouette. 

    I will not wear sticky sunscreen. No need. This is paradise, and I am old. I will be brown as sizzling butter in a pan, golden, warm, and I’ll never burn. 

    In this world when I walk out of the water I’ll feel as light on land as on sea. My right foot will not drop or drag or be dead weight. I’ll shake the water from my body as if I were a dog.

    I’ll eat a hamburger for breakfast lunch and dinner. Sometimes I’ll have biscuits and gravy and four eggs sunny-side up. Then other days I’ll have cheese grits and crispy bacon. I’ll never have kale. 

    There will be a parrot that comes from the jungle, that flies out of the surrounding rain forest that has not been logged to death, but still throbs with secrets. The parrot will come like a guest and preen before me. This parrot will be bright spring green with yellow and some red. This parrot has wise eyes and often tilts his head this way and that as if looking under a bed, and his neck feathers ruffle as if fine silk bunched then laid flat, revealing a rippling incandescence. 

    In this world every dog from my past, every dead and gone dog, will return. They will all like each other and run in circles around each other while making joyful sounds, each with the remembered growl and bark.

 Each one will come when he or she is called. 

I’ll say Come. And they will.

What I've Forgotten

Ray stood with his back to the sink. He’d come in from sanding the house; there was a faint white dust outlining the deep brown of his arms. He pulled his baseball cap off and rubbed his head, his short black hair was spiked with sweat.  

I’d been sketching my dog. Three times I’d held up the sketch book and asked Ray-- Does this look like a dog?

 Not really, he said the first time. The second time he just frowned and shook his head no. The third time he said, It looks like a rabbit.

 I thought:  I will always remember this day.  I will keep this failed dog sketch that then became a rabbit, and I will remember this day.

 I was in day seven of a two-week online writing course. The morning’s prompt had been--Write what you have forgotten. 

 I’d forgotten the time Ray and I had stayed after class, pulled two chairs together in the large seminar room to go over his essay, a disturbing piece about the way he felt compelled to seduce every girl, how miserable he had made some girls, how miserable he was. I remember I thought our chairs were too close.  I could hear him breathing. 

 That was sixteen years ago.

 I asked him today how he’d answer the prompt. Off the top of your head, I’d said.  What have you forgotten?

 He said--I’ve forgotten all the good stuff; I can’t hold onto that.  I can’t remember the face of the girl I lost my virginity to.  I can only remember the bad stuff.  He turned to wash his plate in the sink.

 So what about you? he asked.

 I wanted to tell him about screen memories, about déjà vu and psychoanalytic theories of memory storage and retrieval. I wanted to tell him what Sally Mann had written about photographs robbing us of memory.  Then I thought about Tennyson’s In Memoriam.  I could talk about that at length.

 But Ray had his hands pressed along the rim of the kitchen island, waiting.

 I looked out into the field. I had forgotten that he was not my student but now my friend. I had forgotten what it was like to be asked. 

  I didn’t look at him, instead looked out the window at the swath of Bee Baum that seemed to have bloomed within the hour. I remembered how last year I’d heard a strange soft insistent sound and looked around for the source and discovered about fifty hummingbirds hovered over the flowers.

 I told Ray that I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be well. 

One Cup, Then Another

“I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”  Anne Lamott
― 

Until I’d read Andre Dubus' Meditations from a Movable Chair and Broken Vessels, I’d never contemplated grace.  Because in l999 I'd chosen Dubus as the subject for the lecture required for my M.F.A. at Bennington; because he wrote about the dailiness of grace and gratitude, writing somewhere in his memoir about bringing grace to shopping for groceries, preparing dinner; because I'd hoped to meet him in Boston before I delivered my lecture;  because I'd read all of his books, read interviews he'd given, read transcripts of interviews; because my friends said I would love him;  because I loved his words;  because he died a month before I was to give the lecture;  I began to think about grace, about achieving grace.  To this day I spend minutes of my day trying, sometimes trying hard, to bring grace into whatever I do—even the most mundane, particularly the most mundane, task. I slow down to make a prayer of washing this dish, the one my old cat likes the best. And this one, the cup Frank gave me for Christmas from his own cupboard because one day he made me coffee, and poured it in a blue and white china cup that I declared to be just the perfect most beautiful cup. 

I wash another—the one I bought when Robert Scott Williams was coming to visit, my old friend who lives in Cairo. I wash with care that cream mug with thin red lines, thinking of Robert Scott, the music he makes, remembering when he played his guitar and sang on the screen porch, my new friends gathering around, seeming somewhat surprised. I've thought it must have surprised them, the easy openness, a surprise that this man would simply make music right there, not to call attention to himself but to make music. I wash the mug the way he made music, my mind focussed--with tenderness I wash the mug and like Aladdin’s lamp the memory blooms like a genie, the magic night appears, then disappears, and I begin to wash the green glass plate, the one that reminds me of the sea glass I love, the worn green glass that reminds me of all my oceans, my pilgrimages to water.  The seashore, I begged of my parents as early as four years old.  Take me to the seashore!

This morning I begin the measured routine I have for feeding the birds—the blue scoop into the child’s pink plastic pail, the wooden African bowl filled with suet--with a renewed decision to be deliberate with anything with everything I do during the day.  I've just begun to write again.  I want to learn to read the world again, read carefully, to be grateful for what I can do, for how I can think, for how I can attend to what I have.  

 I crumble the sticky suet and fill a small blue glass bowl. This morning I think of where each of the containers came from: the blue scoop from Aubuchon’s, the hardware store where after seven years after almost daily purchases the clerks finally greet me by name. 

Finally, I always think, finally. 

I come from the South where clerks in check-out lines tell you about their cats, their love-lives, their English profs at community college. 

I can recall the moments when I became visible, when I was SEEN in this small town in the Berkshires I now call home. 

I spend large expanses of time alone. 

This is by choice. I have to remind myself often that This Is By Choice.

For twenty-five years I psyched myself up almost daily to walk into a classroom and give that roomful of students all I had. All of me. All I had. 

I’d stride across campus on the way to class and say to myself—All that matters in the world is this hour.  
I would say to myself: Change them. Say something. Think something. Make one thing happen. Insight. Change. Bring it. Bring it. Bring it. 

I’d think—almost every day that I walked that walk—about the famous actress I saw interviewed on a talk show. She was asked if she still got stage fright. She said yes and the interviewer was surprised. She said that the minute you don’t have the panic, the heart racing breathlessness, the surge of adrenalin that you’ve lost it. The performance will be lame, limp, phoned in. 

After some years of teaching, I lost my vanity. Of course, I always wore my teaching costume—I dressed for them, out of respect, out of the feeling that everything in the room should be jazzy, thought-out, high-pitched, energized. But often I forgot to look in the mirror. And if I did it was to say—OK here you go. Here WE go. 

It was a performance. That sounds egocentric. As if it was all about me. What I want to say is that over time it became all about us, the room the creation we had made together, became together. 

Every semester I fell in love. I loved them. I’m almost certain I can say they loved me. It was shared experience. It was theater of the mind. I was never smarter. My mind was never faster, making connections, pulling all I knew to give to them to help them learn to think so they could have the rush of thinking thinking hard being useful being good being full of grace looking at the world seeing the world seeing through it and into it and being in it. 

I loved them. I miss them. I miss them. Every day I feed the birds I wash the dishes and I miss them.