As long as I can remember, my dad has gone through “phases”. Like a kid who has just discovered baseball cards. He goes out and collects every single thing he can about baseball cards. These things he collects are both concrete (the cards themselves) and abstract (biographical details and stats and other such ephemera). And then, like a kid, he discovers something new (holy shit, PAINTBALL!), and moves on, discarding the fruits of collection like they’re rookie cards of a guy who never made it to his second season.
The first phase I was old enough to notice was the time he threw himself headfirst into Catholicism and bought a little wooden saint with peeling gold and red paint and no hands. Then one day, about a year later, he up and decided that was idolatry and threw it down the incinerator chute in his building on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. I watched this happen and I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how he could change his mind like that, so completely and so suddenly.
The phase he happened to be going through when I was eight resulted in my being baptized a Methodist, a religion about which I still know next to nothing, because he lost interest within a year and so we never went back.
I was ten for the Whitley Strieber phase. Whitley Streiber wrote some novels — including Wolfen, which, if memory serves, was made into a movie. Then he wrote the first in a series of ostensibly autobiographical books describing his encounters with and abductions by alien visitors. The cover art was a close up of a visitor from the shoulders up. (South Park later used the same basic depiction of “Greys” as a model for the aliens that give Cartman an anal probe.)
Dad really digs this book, and encourages me read it. Then, as now, I will read anything, and I have a weakness for stupid supernatural shit like vampires and space aliens and schools for the gifted in outer space. (When ARE they making Ender’s Game into a movie, anyway?) We both read the books, and conduct many in-depth discussions about them. Mostly, I just listen. I’m ten, remember? Lo and behold, I start having nightmares. I suddenly develop an intense fear of the dark. His response? “Oh! She was totally abducted by aliens! And this proves it!”
My dad is a very post hoc ergo propter hoc kind of guy. I won’t be offended if you roll your eyes at him.
But here’s the really funny part. He hasn’t said anything to any of us about this in ages. Fifteen years at least. Then last year my dad and my brother are on some road trip and end up in a redneck bar somewhere to-the-far-left-of-nowhere western New York. After a few beers, Dad says to Robert, “You know your sister was abducted by aliens? Don’t you remember those nightmares she used to have?” It so totally never occurs to him that the books were perhaps the CAUSE of the nightmares. But what really gets me is that this is still something he thinks about, even after all these years.
I wish I could make up stories like that.
My father long since left the whole alien thing in the past. Not surprisingly, because none of his phases last more than a couple of years. Until the last one, that is. When I was in high school he got really interested in Kabbalah. Jewish mysticism. The magic of numbers. The “bible code”. That esoteric blah blah blah that the rabbis in the movie Pi: Faith in Chaos are going on about? Yeah. That.
He never actually converted. He’s a self-described Righteous Gentile, descended, in spirit at least, from the goyim who chose to go with Moses when he parted the Red Sea.
It’s all very amusing to me. Not because I don’t have respect for religion in general or Judaism in particular. The opposite, in fact, is true. I grew up in Rockland County, New York, which boasts one of the highest concentrations of Jews east of Israel. Palestine. Either way. The only reason I don’t have a degree in Near Eastern Studies is I would’ve had to get proficient in Arabic or Hebrew. I was already taking both French and Spanish every semester, and so a semitic language was, I decided, simply beyond the scope of my ability. So I contented myself with studying the history of Muslim Spain, the “real” story of the Christian Crusades, and reading the Torah, the Koran and a whole lot of Arabic love poetry and midrashim. (If you glean from the above that my primary interest in religion has always been academic, you’d be right.)
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Of all the concrete tools in my arsenal, this hand is my favorite.
Tumblr, meet my mom. This photo was taken in 1970. She was a year out of college and teaching biology at Cathedral High School in New York City. She was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. Living in Manhattan was an enormous challenge for her. That first winter, she tells me, she got herself a long brown coat, her secret weapon against the weirdos on the subway who’d otherwise ogle her bottom.
That summer, she made costumes for Shakespeare in the Park. In the fall she continued to teach and also started graduate school at Columbia. The following summer, she and my dad got married. (This is my favorite of their wedding photos. It’s very Buddy Holly meets Annie Hall meets American Gothic.) Five years after that, they moved to Nyack and had me. My brother arrived two years later.
It wasn’t easy for her, of course, when my dad left. But after a while she pulled herself together and did things she might never have done had they remained married. In Montana one summer, under the wing (ha) of a Native American named Brooke Medicine Eagle, she went on a vision quest. She taught at the Audobon Camp in Maine. She lived for a time on the Clearwater, the Hudson River Sloop. She published a short story.
Whenever there were breakthroughs in science, she’d get the newest college textbooks and teach herself whatever there was to learn. Dinosaurs, global warming, mitochondria, and neurotransmitters. For example. She was an enormously popular teacher and at least once a month I pass along to her Facebook messages that I can only describe as fan mail.
In 2001 she and her boyfriend of seven years got married, retired, sold the house I grew up in, moved onto a 45’ Herschoff Mobjack and sailed to the Caribbean. The lived on their boat and sailed from island to island until 2004. They were in Grenada when my mom got word that her father had passed away. She went to Indiana for the funeral, and several weeks later, while she was still in the States, her husband was very badly injured in an accidental fall. He needed orthopedic surgery, and medical care that was simply unavailable in the Caribbean, so she flew back to Grenada so she could be with him while they medievaced him to Florida. He was at one of the best hospitals in the country, and I was so certain he’d be fine, I didn’t talk to him on the telephone before his surgery. On the operating table he suffered a massive stroke. He never woke up.
It was, simply, the scariest thing that had ever happened to me. Not only John’s death, but what it did to my mother. I was so worried about her I couldn’t breathe, or cry, or imagine how we would ever again be whole.
She stayed with me in New York for a while, but by January she was itching to get back to Grenada. It had become home. And so she went. I followed her a few months later. I was supposed to stay for six weeks, but when my time was up I didn’t want to leave. So I stayed. For four years. By the first anniversary of John’s death, we had found a house, brought my grandmother to live with us, and I had met a guy and found a job. I was also pregnant. With Bean. Who is, by the way, named after the grandfather he never got to meet.
I still think about John a lot, and I know my mother does too. I do not think that I will ever, as long as I live, stop missing him. Nor will I forget what it was like to witness my mother become a widow. To watch her face crumple up with a sorrow I could not ever hope to soothe. But I am at peace with the knowledge that we survived the hardest part. We weathered the storm. And we are stronger for it.
Today is Mom’s birthday. She’s 63. She’s just as beautiful as she was at 24. She doesn’t have any wrinkles, and her white hair doesn’t really say “old”. It says “hippie snow princess”. She still bakes and sews and has an almost supernatural touch with our garden. She loves dark chocolate-covered chili peppers. She devours the books I recommend and then wants to talk about them for hours. She is quiet and shy and soft-spoken. She is nothing like me and she is also everything like me. And she is the best Grandma a Bean could ever have.
I love you, Mom. Happy Birthday.
The interior of the same structure.
Hurricane Ivan hit Grenada in 2004. 90% of the buildings on the island lost their roofs. By 2008 most had been repaired or rebuilt, but some, like this one, were abandoned.
Standing here I was struck by the absolute stillness and silence, as well as the sense that the house was slowly but surely being reclaimed by the wilderness.
One might decide to focus on the damage, which would lead one to the conclusion that this house failed to weather the storm.
I choose to focus on the fact that it’s still standing. Unconquered.
This is not about space. This is about a bathtub that is also a sink.
This is about a baby who - for the first month of his life, until his umbilical stump fell off - got daily olive oil rubdowns.
Olive oil.
He smelled like a salad.
I should probably do some ruthless editing.
I brush it with the very tips of my fingers, but then it senses my approach and spirals off into the darkness, out of reach, out of reach.
I plot and I scheme. How can I conquer it? How can I foil momentum’s plans to elude me?
Momentum’s plans. Ha. And ha again. As if momentum were plotting against me. As if momentum were invested in my failure. In my inertia. In my cowardice.
There’s no enemy here. Only white space. Clean pages. Unwritten words. They are patient. They wait, just past the tips of my fingers.
Just.
Beyond.
Reach.
And so? And so I stretch. I raise my arms over my head, arch my back, curve my neck, feline. I stretch, and. And I extend.
Extend. My. Reach.
Momentum.
