An understanding, in three scenes:
I turn the key in the ignition and, as if it had been queued up precisely, Elton John’s song “Seasons,” from the soundtrack to the movie Friends, starts playing and in the span of half a breath I’m thrown back to 1978, so hard in love with Jerry I almost can’t breathe. That was our song, and we were friends then, and I’d never felt all of those huge feelings before. I can take it, though, and I listen with a full heart and appreciate all the ups and downs, the way that life-giving relationship had a very long season in my life, and the way I felt those huge feelings for other people as my life went on, even though I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever feel for anyone what I felt for him.
* * *
Driving along Oliverea Rd, I see water gushing out of cracks in the mountainside to my right. The frozen sculptures are melting and leaving enough space for new water to break through, and I see the world turning, I see the seasons beginning to change—even if tentatively, even if temporarily—and I see time happening. And I think about the thousands of times this has happened, that the ice melts enough for fresh water to start geysering out of those gaps in the mountain. Gushing and then simply flowing and then drying to a trickle and then freezing up solid and then cracking and gushing, again and again and again and again.
* * *
Sitting at the counter, I sip my porter after a really lovely conversation with the owner of the brewery. I open my book, ready to enjoy a quiet hour, and the playlist shuffles from Fleetwood Mac’s great song “The Chain” to Kansas’ hit “Carry On My Wayward Son” and both those songs—especially back-to-back—hurl me backwards again in time to 1976, to high school, to one of the worst times in my life, the most difficult, to the time I had no home, and I marvel at the fact that I have two homes now, and homes with my daughters in Austin and Chicago, and my name is on the deed at Heaventree and there is no mortgage and it’s MY HOME, and I never would have dared to dream I’d have a real home of my own when those songs were on the radio, but all of that is true within the scope of my very small life.
Even though this is the age of narcissism, especially in my country, I don’t think we really want to be so small. I don’t think we want the world to focus on us, to be bounded by our own skin, our own interests, our own views. I think this is why we are so moved by perspective — by drone shots of Central Park with NYC so urgently lining all four sides, or the pyramids pushed hard next to the sprawling city of Cairo, or mountain ranges. I think this is why we’re silenced by time-lapse photography of the Milky Way over the desert, or over Joshua trees. By the dancing Northern Lights. By views and news of space (“outer space” if you’re my age) — by images sent back by Cassini as it approached Saturn, or tremendous gas clouds we describe in our own small terms, horsehead nebulae. By the understanding that all this will continue forward even after we aren’t alive to see it, that our existence, as important as it might be to those who love us, is not required.
Understanding the depth of the ocean, the vastness of space, the existence of time, the planetary pressures and forces, the magic of our sun, the question of where/whether there is life elsewhere, all those things we contemplate and talk about and study are so magical, I think, because it’s intolerable to keep life as small as we are.
And in a very small, unimaginably small analogue, I at this moment am trivial in the span of my own whole life. I am the cold, naked infant lying on a small blanket on a vinyl couch in bitter cold north Texas; the rag doll baby in my dad’s hands; the blue-eyed little girl who saved pillbugs; the teenage girl secretly enduring unimaginable hardship; the young woman madly in love with Jerry; the traumatized too-young mother grappling with her father’s suicide and a colicky baby and her terror at being able to be a good mother; and on and on and on to me, now, and me now is only a blip on the radar even of my own life.
Me now has no idea what will come — joys, family, more grandbabies, world travel, illness? Cancer? A bad fall? Financial disaster? Unbearable loss? Me now, sitting on my couch in my lovely home, watching the creek roar and tumble in the valley below, a blip even on my own radar. I’ll one day look back at this blip with the same nostalgia that I look back at all the rest, and it will be colored in some way that may be eluding me as I live it — maybe in a sorrowful way, like “I had no idea this would be the last…..” or maybe in a joyful way, like “That was one of the happiest periods of my life.”
And so I marvel at perspective, and time and space, and the glory of seeing it all. At the wonder of gushing water, and the time travel machines of books and music, and my limited understanding of celestial mechanics, and the knowledge of my friends’ lives going on merrily or with sorrow on the very opposite side of the world from my own, and the arrow shot into the future that is my grandchildren’s lives — I marvel, imagining the worlds they’ll know that I never could have imagined, and I imagine that one day they will give to their own grandchildren the quilt that their Pete made for them back when they were born, such a long-distant time past that it will seem unreal, and Pete will just be a name they know, the weirdo name of their grandparent’s grandmother.
I love those magical moments like the hour yesterday that brought me the three experiences that opened this post. They don’t happen very often, and to get three, wham-bam-bam, was such a gift. xoxox
