Yesterday I woke up convinced that I had already done everything I ever would do in my life. Why these extra days, I wondered. This must be something like what my father felt ten years younger, when he thought he would die at sixty-five and then treated the final five years of his life as a bonus. I don't even have grandchildren to make the endgame more of an adventure and a discovery. I felt like a sleepwalking wanderer who wakes up halfway across the Sahara thinking Enough walking already, and hearing a voice saying If you don't like the sunshine get into the shade. There are no trees in sight, no bistros, no friends for conversation. True pointless exile.
It has felt more like a mountain climate than the flat north in this part of the late spring, with clear skies at morning, puffy clouds showing up later and building up until thunderstorms can be heard every afternoon, sometimes here, with winds and sheets of rain taking everybody by surprise even though they appeared in the weather forecast long before the skies got dark. The other night it happened so suddenly just after dark that I had been taking leisurely pictures of the yellow sunset, the glowing pink edges on the high clouds, the angels' rays coming over the horizon after the sun's last rays disappeared as I walked back to the car, and the first plashes of rain started as soon as I started to drive away. By the time I got home the air had cooled enough to make me wonder what season I was travelling through. Exile again, but this time instead of from something called home it was from a time of year.
Last night the thunder started long after dark, oddly before I noticed any lightning. And even after the rumbling became sharp cymbal crashes there were not many breaks of light. I was sitting inside, and my first warning of a change in the weather was the sound of water attacking the cars parked on the lot downstairs. I went outside to look, and I felt the floating mist reflecting off every surface around me as I stood far back on the balcony. The frequent rumblings still came alone, without light, even when they got louder. I remembered a distant storm I once saw in Kansas, heat lightning without sound, and thought this must be the missing part.
I am normally self-contained, not caring much about a life without friends, family, colleagues. I have thought that was the only reasonable response to life ever since I saw my father dying in 1979 and realized that one of the things we must do in life is get comfortable with the thought of going out alone, carrying only our memories and our beliefs, deluded or not. He was sure of what waited for him on the other side, and I was not. Even now, more than thirty years later, just as I am prepared to live with my memories and not to care whether they correspond to anything that actually happened, I am willing to embrace my beliefs and not to care whether they say anything about the present or the future. This is what I consider being self-contained. I have not met many people who share that stance in life. It is an antidote to exile. Normally it entails an acceptance of isolation and an unbridgeable gulf between me and anybody else, a permanent distance from everything outside me, regardless of how I try to fill it with love, compassion, concern.
The evening I took pictures of the sunset I was with Henry's son Paul. It's one of my self-imposed volunteer tasks, spending a few hours with this Down Syndrome man, now forty years old. Henry used to tell me he worried about making conditions right for Paul after he was gone. Now Cynthia has to worry alone, and conditions can never be right. He will have a hip replaced in August, and she is desperate to have others care for him for at least two weeks after that. Her long-range plan is to tear their house down to make room for a bigger one for them plus Helen and her husband. I admire them all for wanting to be together, trying to make life easier for Paul. When I take him away for the evening, he complains about his lot, about being at the mercy of people trying to control him or to keep the truth from him. Even six months after the fact, he still gets upset at the hospital staff for not telling him his father was dying. You talked to him, he says to me, did he tell you he was so close to dying? But I've read Moby-Dick; I don't have to be told how close we all are to dying. And no, he didn't tell me.
I have seen a few friends die recently, and none of them told me anything, and I still haven't learned to read the signs. This morning I dreamed that somebody opened the door (which door? I don't know; it wasn't the room I was sleeping in), reached inside, shut the lights, and was standing there in the room with me. Scared me until I got my wits back, but then I was too agitated to get back to sleep. Three o'clock and I didn't need that kind of thing. So I thought I might as well face the day.
Now I have been writing for more than an hour and I can see the sky outside, the first sign of light this close to the longest day of the year. I have always cherished the first light on summer mornings. At various times in my life I would ride my bike through deserted streets or play catch with myself or just read and listen to the radio. It's a time to be alone, to feel as if the world is mine alone. The adventure and discovery of the game without anybody else in it.
And this silly blog insists on placing me on the west coast. Especially odd now, when it's almost time to wake up, not time to go to bed.
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