Birthday Musings

I recently turned 66.  Hard to believe. I started this blog almost 10 years ago. People have come and gone, some by choice, some not. I've lost my stepmom, my dad, my brother, my step-brother, and my nephew. I met my biological sisters after my pre-adoption birth certificate was unsealed.  I've said goodbye to Barkley, Abby Lab, and Lorelei Lab. I've adopted a rescue Lab puppy -Sunny (alter ego BITEY DOG!). Lots of tears, but oh so many good times.

All I can offer by way of wisdom in this, the passing of another year, is this. I’ve heard so many people say: “I’ll do that when I’m older," "When I lose twenty pounds," or "When I’m retired.” We go through life saying, “I would, but it probably wouldn’t work out,” or, “ I’d like to, but . . .” We too often base our actions on an artificial future, painting a life picture based on an expectancy that time is more than sweat, tears, heat, and mirage.

You can’t count on anything. For out of the blue, fate can come calling. When my husband and I lost Barkley, it was after a brief but valiant battle against bone cancer and a weekend of pain we couldn’t keep at bay for him. In a flash, life robbed me even of the power to grieve for what was ending. 

I remember when my brother and I were kids: going down a turbulent little river with little more than an inner tube and youth, risking rocks, rapids, and earth just to see what was around the bend of that forest we’d already mapped out like Lewis and Clark. The water was black and silver, fading swirls of deep current rising to the surface like a slap, fleeting and gravely significant as if something stirred beneath, unhappy to be disturbed from its slumber, making its presence known. A fish, perhaps, or simply fate.

I think of the true story of the woman whose parachute didn’t open on her first jump, and she fell more than a mile and lived—to change her whole life to pursue her dreams. Did she sense something as she boarded that plane, looking into the sky at a danger that she could not articulate or see? Or was she unaware until that moment when she pulled the cord, and nothing happened, as her life rushed up to her with a deep groaning sound? What was it like in that moment, that perception of her final minutes, what taste, color, what sound defined her soul as it prepared to leave? 

I noticed the colors in the paint section of a hardware store the other weekend when I was looking for a brick-colored paint to spruce up a storage caddy in the kitchen.  The yellows were the color I had painted my room as a teen. I noticed the greens, so many of them resembling the green of my parents’ house in the ’60s and ’70s, yet not the same color. You’d not see the original in a landscape, only in a kitchen with avocado appliances while my Mom sang as she made cookies.

I remember my brother and I racing through the house, one of us a soldier, the other a spy, friends forever, stopping only long enough for some warm cookies. Holding that funky green paint sample, I can see it as if it were yesterday - memories only hinted at and held there in small squares of color.

What is it about things from the past that evoke such responses? For some, it’s a favorite photo, a piece of clothing worn to a special event, or a particular meal. Things that carry with them the sheer impossible quality of perfection that has not been achieved since. Things that somehow trigger in us a response of wanting to go back to that time and place when you were safe and all was well. But even as you try to recapture the memory, it eludes you, caught in a point in your mind between immobility and motion, the taste of empty air, the color of the wind.

One morning, while in a hangar checking out a pilot friend’s home-built project, I had one of those moments. It was an old turboprop lumbering down the taxiway with all the grace of a water buffalo. It wasn’t the aircraft that caught my eye; it was one of those planes that carried neither speed nor sleek beauty but embodied inertia overcome by sufficient horsepower. No, it was the smell of jet fuel that took me back to years of pushing the limits, not really caring if I came home, only that the work was done without my breaking beyond re-use, something I was trusted with. Until one day, while my heart was beating despite being broken unseen beneath starched white cotton, my aircraft made a decided effort to kill me. 

It was not the “Well, I’ll make a weird sound and flash some red lights at you and see what you do, an aircraft’s equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the North cackling: “Care for a little fire Scarecrow?” No, a severe vibration shook the yoke right out of my hand as we accelerated through 180 knots on the initial climb when, unbeknownst to me, a small piece of metal on the aircraft’s tail had come loose and was flapping in the breeze.

At that moment, as I heard the silent groaning of the earth below, I thought, I do not wish to die—and I fought back. In that moment of slow and quiet amazement that can come at the edge of sound, I found in myself a renewed desire to live, recognizing the extent and depth of that desire to draw another breath and share that soft, warm breath with another. Today is a memory that months from now could be one of those memories, not of fear, but of triumph. 

You may look back and see this day, the friends you were with, the smile on your face, the simple tasks you were doing together. Things so basic in their form to at this time simply be another chore: cleaning, fixing, an ordinary day, while children played with a paper plane fueled by laughter and the hangar cat drowsed in the sunlight. It might be a day you didn’t even capture on film, no small squares of color left to retain what you felt as you worked and laughed together, there in those small strokes of color, those small brushes of hope as you wait for your best friend to join you.

Ten years from now, you too may look at yourself in the mirror, at the fine wrinkles formed from dust, time, and tears around your eyes, at a few grays in your hair, and you will think back to this day, the trivial things that contain the sublime. On that day, so far beyond here and now, you may look around you; a two and four-legged one you love no longer present, and you’ll want it all back. Want it as bad as the yearning for a color not found in nature, in the taste of something of which you search and ache, acting on the delusion that you can recreate it, those things that haunt the borders of almost-knowing. You touch the mirror, touch your face, and wish you’d laughed more, cared less of what others thought, dove into those feelings that lapped at the safe little edges of your life, and leaped into the astonishing uncertainty. 

My brother spent years running silent and deep under the ocean, visiting places I can only guess at as he will not speak of it, a code about certain things I share with him. But I knew the name "Operation Ivy Bells." He understood testing the boundaries of might and the cold depths to which we travel in search of ourselves. On his last nights, he and I talked, but not of those days under the ocean. We both were aware of grave matters of honor but do not speak of them, not even with each other. I’d sit as he talked about Dad and how he hoped Dad would live to be a hundred (he made it to 101), how he hoped he would be there to take care of him, even as I watched 120 pounds leave his frame as he went through another round of chemo and radiation. 

He talked until his eyes closed, only his labored breath letting me know he was still with me. I could hear the rise and fall of his chest as he tried to push up from the waters of the sea, his unfathomed flesh still so buoyant, if only in spirit, as the cold water lapped against him.

I, too, have had more than one day where I stood outside on a pale crescent of beaten earth and breathed deeply of that cold, having traded in my wings for a black bag, a badge, and Dr. in front of my name. On those days, I felt every muscle ache; my skin was hot under the sun, the savage, fecund smell of loss in the air, lying heavily in the loud silence. Somewhere in the distance would come a soft clap of thunder; overhead clouds strayed deliberately across the earth, disconnected from mechanical time. I’d rather be elsewhere; the smell simply that of kitchen and comfort, the sounds only of laughter wrapped in the joy and weariness of adopting a rescue puppy when you're 66 years old. 

So I knew how lucky I was to simply be, in that moment, and alive. I’d go home on such nights and pour a drink, which now is simply a cup of strong Scottish tea, and prepare a small meal. I’d eat it slowly, letting the sweetness and salt stay on my tongue. For me, there would be no quick microwaved meal eaten with all the detachment of someone at a bar tossing back a handful of stale nuts with his beer. No, I wished to taste and savor the day, the warm layers of it, this day that was someone's last.

-LBJ