"To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit."
After taking a break since April 2nd (it's now 22 May), I'm back at the keyboard and back in my steamy home office in Corning. As always, there is a leaf blower out there drowning out the birds chirping on an otherwise spectacular spring day. Twelve months a year they find reasons to run those damned things here--in the winter blowing snow, in the fall leaves, and this time of year clearing lawn trimmings off sidewalks I guess. The grass up here grows fast and thick, so fast that ours already looks shaggy and unkempt only a few days after John the yard guy came and went.
It is lovely in the Southern Tier though, far more so than any space I've experienced back home.
I do love that spot. P and I have settled back into a rhythm of sorts, working during the day and retiring onto those wicker chairs in the cool evening for a cocktail and maybe a little Braves baseball or music while Dean rolls around in my lap.
Here's the view looking back the other way at the house from Pine Street, taken last night while walking back from a very expensive Thai supper down on Market Street.
For at least the next little bit, our routine will include weekends up at the condo on Canandaigua Lake. We'll be driving over to Captain Skip's on Saturday to pick up the 1957 Chris Craft we bought last fall and left in Skip's barn for the winter, and are hopeful the old girl will start and we can tootle around the lake on Sunday like two oldsters reenacting On Golden Pond.
Maybe the lack of routine has been the source of my discomfit and unease lately. Just in the last couple weeks, we drove from PC to the farm and then caravanned 1300 highway miles up to Corning, me in the pickup and Peg in the convertible. I had visions of dictating and doing conference calls enroute, but got a bad case of the screw-its and ended up listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History for twelve hours. Carlin's portrayal of the Viking Age was completely riveting--far more interesting than a conference call to discuss an expert's work in a construction defect case or dictating a motion to compel.
I hadn't been here fully a week when I turned around and flew to Memphis and then drove to Oxford to officiate the wedding of a young lawyer I helped mentor not long ago. His father was killed when he was a child, and I couldn't help noticing that the best man and the rest of the cast for this event seemed heavily weighted with guys my age who'd helped him find his way in the world.
As a grim coincidence, when I messaged a cousin down in Water Valley that I'd like to ride down and see them during my short time in Mississippi, she suggested I could see much of the family at Baptist Hospital in Oxford, where her sister/my cousin was dying of renal failure. After attending a lovely, music-less Rite One service on Sunday at Oxford's historic St. Peter's Episcopal Church, once a center of the civil rights movement in the bad old days, I rode down to the hospital and found all of them there, poor Tammy seventy pounds and miserable as her husband consulted with the medical staff about inserting a feeding tube against the assembled family's wishes. I was back in my mother's room in the ICU, reliving it all again. As it happened, Tammy died yesterday and the prolonged agony the feeding tube might've forced on her never came to pass.
Death hung in the air yesterday, it seemed. Just before I heard the news of Tammy's passing, my best friend in high school, with whom Peg and I had shared supper a couple weeks ago back in Hemet, called to tell me in barely a whisper that his son had died of a drug overdose the night before.
I am extraordinarily poor at these moments when death reminds us it's been there all along. I mean really, really poor at it. A part of me, maybe the inner fighter pilot still rooting around somewhere behind my amygdala, wants to make a farce of the whole thing, crack a joke or ask if the decedent's stereo is spoken for (an old quip fighter pilots used to make as we walked out to the jets was something along the lines of, "If things don't go so hot for you out there today, can I have your stereo?" Not terribly funny when I think on it).
Instead I found myself standing in a darkened hospital room telling Tammy I was sure glad I got to see her, and to hang in there--the same vapid line I heard myself speaking to Rob on the phone yesterday.
You'd think after passing the class on pastoral theology in seminary, which devoted no small amount of time to ministering to bereaved family members, I'd have something more to offer than that. But I don't.
I'll call Rob today at some point, probably every day for the balance of the week. But why? So I can repeat the same tired bromides and show my concern, I suppose. As we learned in that pastoral theology class, however, the more important call should arrive in a month or so, after the boy is in the ground and the condolences quit arriving in Rob's in-box; just him and Leslie and those grandkids they now will raise in his son's absence.
But all that sadness and loss aside, things are good. I do love our time up here, love the scenery and the sanity, and the silence now that the damned blower has stopped. The trip to Mississippi did remind me, however, that as much as I like these folks, I'm not one of them. Standing out in front of the hospital surrounded by cousins with the same sense of wry mischief, even in our 50s and 60s, and roaring with laughter as a raconteur at the wedding reception described over drinks the time in college when he was cajoled into the boxing ring with a guy who--unbeknownst to him--was a runner-up welterweight for the U.S. Olympic Team, who then proceeded to lay him out on the canvas twice after our storyteller punched the guy in the face with all his might to zero effect---I was reminded we Southerners are different, in ways that are cringeworthy and ways that add color and richness to that way of life.
"We Southerners." Really? I went to high school and college in Southern California, can trace roots there on my mom's side well over a century. I reckon when you come right down to it, I'm from nowhere.
So for today I'll just be happy to be where I am, and look forward to P walking back through the door in a little while. Life's not going to get any better than this.
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