| in america 6 part 3 - 2004 august-september | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
27 August 2004 4:30. I'm thinking a couple of things. These are things I've thought in passing, maybe it hasn't occurred to me to write down. One is that Margo's evaluation is positive but not well written. Nothing from her is likely to help get a new job. She's too vague and conventional. Another is that oil really is the weak point of the culture I'm in. If the Islamists are determined to bring us down that is the place to apply the lever. If the price of oil rises past a certain point transport stops, all the continent rushing around. Population is distributed in a way that depends on the rushing around. Reorganizing to do without oil should have been a priority but oil interests, transport interests, etc -
Bush is spending oil madly in his war and accelerating oil drilling throughout the public parks. (The number for US dead is nearing 1000.) He's primitive. Layla's done. I'm slogging. Don't feel I can go to Work & days after their stuff, or anything else. Michael Duke today was wearing a clean white teeshirt. His thin chest looked nice. I saw him look at mine too. - Jonesing - not for anyone - life - just life. I go on the web. Can't reach anyone that way. Nothing. But then I put Joe Fendler into Google and there's his piece about being in the Pentagon when the plane hit. A photo. Intense eyes. His piece is well written. Isabel's eyes? Tom's family, through Tom, has made it in America: a Washington bureaucrat. Ireland and that one lost German reached an arm through three generations of drunks to a good house in DC. His piece is quite sweet. It's him for sure. He's a good man. Though Republican probably. 28 "I'm a war president." He loves to say that. So important. Hole in my heart where the sky used to be - bitterness or blank where my love for Tom used to be - wasting endurance where touch and play used to be. Take stock. I'm 59. I'm healthy. With not much effort I can still be goodlooking. I have a good car - owe about $1400 apart from the jeep. My kids are okay. I'm respected and secure in my job. The worst thing is that my brain is fading. I often can't find words. I don't have intellectual energy like I did. I don't have an intellectual context. I don't have a context. I don't have heart connections. I don't have heart at all. I'm very free but don't have money to do anything. I have film work and writing and Being About. People can use them - a few people. I don't know where to be. This isn't the right place. There's nowhere else I want to be. Going back to Vancouver isn't right. It's as if I'm waiting helplessly for instructions on and on.
Work and days is right. I can put my slides on the web. When I've got all my work on the web will it be time to commit suicide? (No.) I have nothing to look forward to. I don't really even have fantasies anymore. - So now it's evening, too late to go to the gym, once again nothing to do. 29 Hm, I forgot flair and flare were different words. Last night I set up the scanner and got a few slides though it is crashing. The first one was Tom, the real Tom, the blue slide. Then I edited Dec 1998 and continued this morning. I am so happy in that work. - Gym today - in the mirror there I am in my orange singlet. My chest and shoulders look smooth, round, strong. The skin is lightly browned and not weathered. My bum is rounder and higher. I'm overjoyed. I stand in front of my bathroom mirror looking at my belly, which still has a little mound, but it's between two muscle indentations and it's not as deep as it was. I feel more physical and springy. Started looking for Tom. Felipe closed and not answering his phone. Amanda slid in under the wire with some real writing. 30 Felipe hasn't seen him since March. He had a friend who worked at St Vincent's who said he was okay and he was still there. He said Oscar has been by looking for him. Robert ran into me in the library. He said Tom had jumped on Tom Mix because he said something bad about me. I saw Pat in his scooter under a jacaranda in front of the New Palace, parked and rushed back. He hadn't seen Tom in a year. He said call Vince, Vince is working after 3. Vince says a couple of months ago someone said Tom was selling cars. I've sent him an email, and Rebecca too. Have Oscar's phone #. I can send a letter to St Vincent's. The disadvantage is that I won't know whether he gets it. Oscar has means to track people - he's my best chance but he may not want to tell me. The phone rang just now and it was Michael wanting to borrow money. I hated that. It was funny that after years I ran into Robert on the day I started looking for Tom. He said he had just discovered he has two grandchildren. His son phoned him out of the blue and said he was graduating from college. I'll be there, Robert said. And was. I sent a test email to Lycos with a nonsense address. The test was returned. The email to couldbe wasn't. 31st I woke in the dark with a tight solar. Asked why and saw Tom standing in front of me, long straggling beard, rough hair, completely bereft. Blood pressure yesterday 128/84 at Ralph's in PB. Three minutes earlier when I'd been walking it was 153/84. Oscar says he hasn't seen him since last winter. He says he knew he was doing crystal meth, he's always done it. And so now I wonder what is Tom's value to Rebecca, Felipe, Oscar, me - why are we not willing to let him drop out of sight, why do I look at the photo on my computer screen and feel I still want to be with that man. What is the value of the heartbroken addict. 1st September Well this morning Jeanne sends me an email that says "You, Miz El, are the first person I ever remember who talked to me straight, directly, and while I didn't always agree with what you said and needed time to process some of what you said, ..." Note from Rebecca last night said she had an email from Tom in July saying everything is the same. I'm nettled he's gone back to having her as his anchor - the good girl who's never anything but supportive. But anyway it suggests he'll get my email and either answer it or not.
- The best story in Alistair MacLeod's collection, The road to Rankin's Point, is about a 26 year old man who know he's dying, and his grandmother who has survived many of her children and knows so too. I am noticing that now I'm interested in death in ways I never was. 1976. MacLeod's story of miners. Most of his stories a sense of the physical heroism of traditional men. It's impressive. It's shaming, in a way. What men have been required to do. And what is the comparable valor of traditional women. Bearing the men. MacLeod doesn't talk about wife battering, child battering, wife rape, child rape, the costs to women of drunkenness, which he praises. Alistair MacLeod "The road to Rankin's Point" in Island: the collected short stories of Alistair MacLeod Macmillan and Stewart 2nd Most of August the days have started grey. The marine layer burns off midmorning and then the day may be very hot, but in the evening a sometimes almost icy cold arrives. I never sit on my rooftop, the glare and the loud ugly machines. I look at my pots of agaves and crassulas and haworthias - I go out and look at each one - and then I come back inside. - Mike was married to an Ojibway woman called Freckles. She lived in Michigan and he lived here. They had three children, a boy and two girls. The girls were Merlin and Raven, the boy was called Stoneboy, which he said is a famous name. Five years ago they were back east going home in separate cars because he stayed behind to dismantle an awning after a pow-wow. Sixty miles out he noticed a wreck on the road. He didn't know it was her. There is a mourning custom where you observe various sacrifices for a year for each death. You hold their memory. Something about planting a small wrapped stick. So four years? I ask. Five, he says. He mounds his hand over his belly. That one makes him cry. He's just coming to the end of the five years. He thinks the disaster brought his cancer back. He met her in a bar. She was a drunk. He rescued her from some trouble and she looked at him and said, You a skin? Later she'd take the kids to her parents and go to a honkytonk. I was thinking of my series of deaths, Janeen in 2000, Frank in 2001, Joyce in January and Ed in November of 2002, Tom by inches since June 2002. Has the emptiness of my time had anything to do with those deaths? After this conversation Michael asks me to buy him a coffee. His other child, Tara, the nineteen year old, has had her baby, Michael Noah. Lakota Sioux, Dakota, nagi gluhapi, keeping the soul. Souls kept for three days to a year. Responsibilities of looking after a soul: "look after this soul all the time." Shouldn't fight, should pray all the time. Displayed their grief by not washing or shaving, not combing their hair, not cutting their nails, not changing their clothes - Rome, Jews, Shinto.
3rd Favor writes. I write her back what amounts to another packet letter. I'm tough. I tell her she has to be a father to herself and that wanting a father is not wanting patriarchy. And then I come out of it quaking at heart, quaking about Tom, quaking that he's going to get my note and ignore it, that I've been dropped. And then I think I have to find him, I have to talk to somebody in the St Vincent's bureaucracy, I have to make him say it to my face. I haven't had this heart pain for a long time, and it's very intense. The clouds today are flowing from the south. 4th Labor Day weekend. Saturday morning, Crest Café. This morning was clear, is clear. There's the sky, a bit milky, pigeons sunning themselves on cables, poking into their breast feathers. I'm not at liberty, still a tight heart. There's a blue gum not moving a twig. Have I been here long enough to say this is an autumn light? I'm wearing my Gap jeans, the small ones. They aren't loose but they fit. And I'm wearing the black crushed velvet string-strap top and my fitted corduroy shirt. Docs because the red Converse are in the wash. Little things are screwy. The closet door is off its top hinge and has to be propped on books and doesn't close. Both Visa cards are saying "card invalid" at the ATM. The scanner isn't working though I've been hours on the phone with four different guys (who are in St Catherines out-sourced for Hewlett-Packard) and they sent a replacement base. I'm so jangled by having put myself out to Tom, why'd I do that. Was editing the first half of 1995 last night. I was so lively. It said yesterday that what I'm mourning is the loss of subtle intelligence. His? No, my own, wild intelligence, generosity within the losses of an addicted lover, the enterprise, the work of coming through. Because he quit I got cut short. He widowed me in our real hope. But I have to be a married widow, because there is no other chance, that was it. So how does faithfulness go in married widowhood? I can tell the story. I can keep the soul, "look after this soul all the time." The way they say it is that it brings something to everyone. Alistair MacLeod has a story in which a man marries his true love and they build a house together on top of a mountain. She dies in the fourth childbirth. The story takes up at the point where he is an old man living alone in the house they built. He has the company of a beautiful mare, a work horse he has not worked because he has been too old. He has been renowned as a Gaelic singer, and a CBC producer auditions him for a special. He sings all the slow verses of a lament. He says it is a story so he can't sing just a few of the verses. An outsider buys the horse for more than he'd thought he could get for her. It turns out that the horse has been sold to a Premarin factory. The CBC picks an ignorant group willing to sing fast and brief. I was thinking that maybe the task of old age is to be the keeper of tragedy. It's as if, coming as far as I did, with so much hope and effort, that's the task I've been given. - There was a small flat spot on my right forearm, slick, shiny. It is now crusting. Is it some kind of skin cancer? The pictures on the web are hard to read. If I were going to die the first thing I'd want to know is, did T and R do it? The second is, did Tom do it by defeating me? Would I die of letting myself love Tom? I'm frightened. Say what's the worst that could happen. Living in fear, living a medical life. The fear would be worst, uncertainty. Worst outcome: rapid spread, death within a year. I'd have time to get GW up. I'd have to move back to Van.
- The end of Saturday, what have I done. Was working with the last half of 1995, going off the deep end with Tom. A lot of bookwork not transcribed yet. I did record that time, I have it, the way the Golden West and the whole city and the whole county went magic. I dare feel it again, yes. And then I transcribed 1965, the summer Frank and I found ourselves in each other's arms two and a half years after we had separated, and had two weeks of joy he later called a splurge of time. But what would time be for if not that taking up of what was true and still is true? And then the letters of his first few years of marriage, happy letters when his kids were born and they were building the farm. 5th Peach trees, honey bees, Douglas firs, coyotes, a girl and two boys, a wife who made beeswax candles and did his bookkeeping. I didn't spoil his marriage, "a lot of love" he said. And then what did he do to spoil it. - Wendell Berry 2000 Jayber Crow Counterpoint Berry imagining a good life. I could imagine Port Williams riding its humble wave through time under the sky, its little flames of wakefulness lighting and going out, its lives passing through birth, pleasure, suffering and death. He has Jayber Crow, his good man, imagining a father god who loves the world. He doesn't want him foolish so he has him say "I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever." Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. I don't know why he wants to mix god into it. "To love the world as much even as I could love it would be suffering also, for I would fail. And yet all the good I know is this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart. "I will stand like a tree," I thought, "and be in myself as I am." And the things of Port William seemed to stand around me, in themselves as they were. It seemed to me that, because of my vow, a possibility - of faith, of faithfulness - that I could no longer live without had begun leaking into the world.
Berry and MacLeod, reading men who write about men who live with land. What is it about Ed and Frank, what did they do wrong, what wrong was done them. - I have edited the first 4 vols of GW apart from bookwork and some passages that are maybe too mean. I think they're interesting. The first two are miscellaneous dating of weird adventurous kinds, the second two fall into real love over my head. The format makes it less tight than a novel and yet it has stories, mostly very swiftly told, and some told over many volumes. I think the characters and the relations are given with unusual realness. Somebody is going to be able to like reading Jim and David, and then the love story with Tom is thrilling. I don't experience myself as a character but people will see one because I give so many angles on myself, the way I do on others. The instability of the people is what I feel as not old-fashioned. Nobody is frozen. 6th Phone rang this morning. He's relaxed. He's fat, a 40 pound tub on his belly and inner thighs. He is adapted to St Vincents, elected the house rep, on the movie committee. He thinks he'd like a camperized van he could park at Del Mar, at Leucadia, Mesa Grande. He's clean for a year and doesn't want drugs, he says. He can get a vet pension probably, vet housing. He writes emails to Mike Mathews. He reads. He's been reading everything he can find about Jung. Maybe he'll write Casual Labour. He takes naps. He's hardly left St Vincents. He's calm. The right side of his face is friendly. The left is no longer heartbroken. He's smiling his young husband smile. I noticed that something shut down in me when he talked about the camper van. It's a bachelor's plan. Eliz writes after a summer away. She bought a house in Texas. I started looking for Tom a week ago. He is safe. He has medical and dental, therapy, three meals, a cubicle, a staff of caretakers, a community of people he can help, movies on weekends, laundry, bus passes. He doesn't have to bluff. He's not insisting on an image. It's Labor Day evening. I moved my plants and chairs around to winter positions. Two days of Santa Ana sunrises and sunsets, hot midday - very hot. It was a second Sunday, which has a more open feeling than yesterday's Sunday. Doesn't have habits. I was editing/transcribing 1996 this morning and don't want to transcribe more tonight. - 1996 is not simple to edit because it's the beginning of the heaviest work with Tom and with attachment pain. There was a lot of play in the first two volume and then beautiful heart in the second two, but in vol 5, how much of the fretting to leave in, what's fretting and what's learning. The first edit left out a lot but it seemed to smoothen it out to much. The first edit was the book's so maybe it had a sense of overall balance that I don't. Tom's voice on the phone struck me as wonderful. The sight of him didn't. I opened the laptop and showed him the picture of Joe. He put on his spectacles and gave it a solid stare. First time he's seen what his boy looks like. He looks like Vic. - There I rolled up my pants and hosed off everything on the second floor. Tap water these days is warm. It was lovely sweeping water barefoot under the security lights. I came back up with the broom and was going back to lock the gate just as a man with a backpack was arriving at the top of the stairs. He said, Is this your place where you live? It's not easy being on the street, do you have a water tap I could use? I pointed him to the tap under the stairs. He was well-spoken and had an open nice-looking face, young. I said there's another tap downstairs and pointed it out to him from above. I said, It's nice and quiet there, there is security, they come around midnight. I didn't have time to think it through. Now I'm wishing I'd offered him a spot on the roof for the night, and fed him and heard his story. Not fast enough - not good. - I'm kind of muddled about Tom being back. I was living in a kind of emergency of abandonment and this end of the emergency leaves me without the drive I had in journal transcribing and maybe death-feeling. I'm saying - in my way - he's not really back, that's not really him. He's not really wanting to be with me. He's not really able to be with me. We're going to be tepid friends, there's no charge. We're going to go into separate ways. He isn't going to have money to do anything. It's good for him that he's being looked after and can relax, but I still want to live excited. I could miss him but I couldn't be glad to see him. That's how I am. 8 Michael's beauty. When he's not talking he's very striking. He's growing a beard, grey, and it brings out the blue of his eyes. It's a strong sensitive intelligent private face, very real, quite sublime. As far as I can tell it is also false. He is proud of his little crimes, like a child - poaching fish, stealing a truckload of roses from Balboa Park. There's always a request to do something extra for him. He wants to evade looking after himself. He wants to recoup some childhood neglect. 9 A dream that I'm in a bathtub in some institutional bathroom, large, as if white tile floor. I've somehow sloshed water over the sides so it's running 2" deep into the corridor when the door opens. Luke has appeared in a chair next to me. He looks melancholy. Do you still love me? he asks. I see that there's shit in the water. I'm looking for the toilets. There are maybe four of them across the room. They are an ugly design. I'm considering how they could be better. I wake in the dark with this dream. It's 5:11. It reminds me of what I'm feeling about Tom as he is - that he's nothing, and all the fuss in 1996 was about nothing, a trying to clean myself up that was dirty, badly designed. Meanwhile Luke is the one who matters. Why does my handwriting this morning have that looser pleasuring feel? My waist is down another half inch, that's an inch and a half since I started. So if that source of energy was mad and is gone since I cleaned up, which I seem to have, what's left? I looked at the Wild research notes and they are effortlessly good. They do sum up what I learned doing the doc. I can do notably good stuff without much effort. It's not often called for. Other than that, I am surprisingly tired after 4 hours working in the garden. Going camping 'til Saturday. - Culp Valley [with Michael]. I have to get far enough away from the sound of his voice - that's the first thing to say. Where am I. It's dusk. A field of rocks. Rocks in heaps. Kopjes. It was a lot of driving - look over there - pink on ramparts higher than these. I like learning about things and there has been a lot of that today but at the moment I've hit my limit for remarks. There are two birds near each other on dry twigs at the top of - an oak? It's quiet. It's fading. The birds are chipping. 163 to 15 to Old Castle Road to Nate Harris Grade up the west side of Palomar. 10th Friday. When I'm not alone I can't spread out. A lot of heavy flies. Is he sulking because I told him to shut up? He's sitting reading old newspapers through the morning. Last night there was this sort of pleasant wind, warm. This is a good spot. Should I figure out how to be comfortable with someone who's here but not an intimate - well, first, don't try to be intimate. It's three things. It's the chatter. The nice ways of shutting him up don't work. Two it's that he's unobservant and unresponsive to anything about me. Three it's the dirtiness, dirty buckets, old newspaper, grubby bits of food, the smell of his clothes. On the other side is this place, the Palomar Road, his knowing things about birds, an innocent hopefulness which is nice though it's based on not observing. There's a fourth thing too, it's being aware of being a disappointment by not being an indulgent supportive mother. What would it say - It would say look for the tone of your resistance - don't take it personally - minor character in Dickens - a natural history of. Look how blue the sky is toward the west, waterless. I like this buckwheat thing because it has silver lines standing with the dark brown of dead stalks. The silvers end in a series of tufts of beige flowers, the dark brown thin almost to points and may be taller. From a distance the whole seems almost lavender grey. - Around the corner. What is this very dry shrub that's giving me its shade. Such tough leaves, so they dry as hard warped ovals, pinky-russet to silver grey in a complicated litter. The bush squeaks. Rocks with lichen like one, two, three, four paint colors dribbled thick and crazing as they dry. Hotel-pale-green, mustard, chartreuse, grey-brown, curry orange, black - is six - on a coarse black and white granite. The broken stem of this bush has a faint pine smell. High cumulous floating in from the west is bringing patchy shade. Here around me, also: decomposed granite paths, cholla with new growth very thriving, small stuff so dead it's hard to tell what it is, grass and small flowers, a wide-spreading shrubby small tree with tiny olive-green leaves - scrub oak I think, very tiny, it's everywhere - cat's claw that tiny acacia. These flies are beautiful though loud, red-brown eyes and the rest shades of grey, striped. Come back you and let me look again. It stands on my hand probing with its thick little proboscis, nervously shifting its hairy black legs. The smooth curve of asphalt down across, lying like the continuous dark sound it traces when that tanker truck comes into sight climbing and curving. Its back is striped and its lower section spotted - It's a lemonadeberry I think, very drought-stressed. Yucca. - He didn't offer to contribute to the gas, or even to the Coleman fuel, and when the time came was bumming cigarettes in the gas station forecourt. I'm writing him off. Last night I got in bed as the sky faded and lay under warm sky seeing the curve of the Milky Way show up. I was muttering in indignation at Michael until all at once the indignation stopped. He'd gone to sleep, I thought. It was his indignation probably. Maybe he was annoyed I didn't buy him a packet of cigarettes. It's Saturday morning. We'll pack up and drive back. It was a good night, silent in a soft way. I'd wake and not mind, look at how much the Milky Way had shifted, then I'd fade again. I dreamed Louie gave me a check for my 60th birthday. She made it out to both of us, 12,116 to me, and 1,211 to her (not sure about the last two numbers). 11th My students cry when they get my letters. Favor, Emily, Corin. They cry because I set my finger carefully and precisely on the place. I discern. I'm not afraid. Oh Favor has come through. With this one I cry too. She's stepped over the sill. 12 Luke phoned yesterday - from work, breaking up on his cell, interrupted by men moving equipment - to say he got the books I sent him and had read all three in two days - The conservationist, Wonder book of the air. He didn't like Field notes as much. It is wonderful that he is able to read books by women, which Tom for instance cannot do. Sunday morning. Thinking of the way I couldn't think, up there with him. I couldn't want to write anything of what had already happened, maybe because I was somehow having to stave him off. I'll consider why. We had a conversation 10 days ago that was so real I opened my heart to him. I looked at his beautiful face and felt what a dignity of loss he has - three children and their mother from one moment to another in violent catastrophe, and afterward five years of mourning, one year for each, and in those years his adolescent lymphoma recurs, so that he is living medicated and in anxiety without money, in some sort of rehab housing he's ashamed of. He often feels weak and sore. He sleeps badly. After that conversation I was rushed by a fear that I have cancer and will die. I've realized later that it was probably empathic, but it took a few days and in the meantime I shut down on him, or he shut down too, I'm not sure. What I know is that I did. I wasn't telling him what I was feeling. I'm afraid of some kind of shamanic transaction. He's sponging off me - getting me to buy him coffee, cigarettes, trying to get me to lend him money, intimating he'll share gas and then not doing it - and I'm resisting in a way that could mean something deeper is going on - does it? Is he trying to get me to take on his cancer? Can he transfer it to me? I know I'm cautious of derelicts since Tom. The way I'm suspicious of his sponging may be just that I know now what a long grief I can sign on to if I open my heart to a taker. It sez cancer cannot be transferred that way and his taking is simple childishness. I have been a sponger too. When I was with Frank he paid for everything - I'm amazed now to think it was assumed. When I hitch-hiked in Europe I paid for my rides with charm but still, I expected anyone would give me whatever I needed. And then there was welfare. I was doing what I thought I should be doing - and I was right - and so I suppose he is doing what he thinks he should be doing - and is he right? It says yes. But he is wrong to call it friendship when what he really wants to transact is a business relationship. That's where his childishness is putting a twist into his method. He wants to be my naturalist-gigalo, a relation that pretends to be personal when in actuality he should be saying, I want to get out into the backcountry and you want to learn some of what I know about it. I'll guide you in exchange for transportation, food and $- per day. His childishness is that he needs to assume transportation and food will be supplied freely, out of love for his being. He doesn't want the explicit power relation there'd be if I hire him. I could say no, it's not worth it to me, and second, if I hire him, I'm the boss. A guide would normally do the driving and the cooking and the cleaning up and packing. He isn't capable of being a guide, he's too messy and improvident. He wants to need to be taken care of, so he can't offer the business relationship and tries to call it friendship. I hate the sleaze of that. Have I said as much as I need to about him? I haven't been trying to teach him. I haven't been investigating the way I would have, I'm backed off. Do I need to be afraid of feeling for him? No, it says. He isn't a seducer. What he wants from me isn't my heart. He won't go for that. Is this my post-Tom sanity? No. Am I safe now from everything Tom threw at me? No. He lost intelligence early by family brutality, but he found a way to remain in early love by glomming onto animals. He held onto early love somehow - that's his beauty, which is true but not human, not comprehensive, though it looks as if it could be. In drawing him toward me again after so long a time, I seem to have summoned ... Uncle Andrew in the plenitude of his being - the man he would have been ... had he been capable. ... I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgment. And yet, in suffering that light's awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be. That light can come into this world only as love, and love can enter only by suffering. ... I used to think I wanted most of all to be happy - by which I meant to be here and to be undistracted. ... Sometimes I know that I could not see at all if it were not for this old injury of love and grief, this little flickering lamp that I have watched beside for all these years. - There is a lot in Wendell Berry that's specious. The ellipses are places where he dodges into afterlife belief. He's another of the men who closes his eyes to wife-beating, child-beating, the real worst in people and fate. He holds onto early love in a partly weak way. What I copy the passage for is its desire, the desire I have too, to have Ed and Frank calm in an afterlife given another chance to be what they'd have been able to be under perfect circumstances without injury. But can love enter only by suffering? I don't think so. Love enters first by provision - he's leaving out the mother. First by animal provision through the placenta, so it is felt as a flow forever after. Afterward suffering not avoided can force open the well of realness which includes love with other certainties, but that is only because refused suffering had capped the well. Now, the trip. Up 15 to Old Castle Road, Cole Grade Road, and then Nate Harris grade, that switchback dirt road up the west flank of Palomar, rising over beautiful Pauma Valley, wide and agricultural, an amazing road. No, say this first. I fetch Michael at Starbucks at 10. He has new pants, good green dockers, and is wearing a black teeshirt. His luggage is a dirty white pickle bucket and a plastic library bag full of old newspaper. He is happy, gives me a hug. We zip up 15 chattering. I have to concentrate on the road. But then on Old Castle Road there are orange farms. He's chattering on. His chatter is suddenly unbearable. I ask nicely whether we could stop talking, because if I have to concentrate on driving and at the same time want to be able to look at where we are, there is one thing too many. He doesn't stop. I say ssh. He doesn't stop. Ssh, I say. He's offended. I'm talking to him like a child, he doesn't do that to me, he says. I have a burst of exasperation. Why should I be having to listen to your opinion of ---- instead of seeing bushes! He says, but he's just saying his thoughts. I'm riled: Say them inside your head like a civilized person! Then he does shut up but it's a damaged silence. But I love the road and the Valley and praise them and he recovers his good will. He tells me the ceremonial way to pick sage and shows me the southernmost stand of trembling aspens in California, up there spilling down a shallow draw, starting to turn yellow. We sit in a meadow he likes, he under an oak and I on the other side looking at wild oats and manzanita, which are thick with berries. He brings me deer bones, which clack together. I leave them behind. Higher up he shows me poison oak and incense cedar. We eat chokecherries at the summit. I wait by the side of a road while he scrambles downhill to look at a dry spring. He comes up with another dirty bucket. We drive down the spine of Palomar and look around through the Lake Henshaw flats and get to Culp Valley at the right time, which is evening. I have had a lot of driving, and now have to cook before I can stop and feel where I am. Set up the stove, organize stuff - get his dirty bits onto the other table, clean and peel vegetables, set up my bed down on a flat area of decomposed granite. He's wanting to chatter. I say I am going to write in my journal and sit far enough away so that his voice can't easily reach. He makes cocoa from packages. It's good. It gets dark. I sit by the other table and wash, talk about how nice it feels, hoping to encourage him to do the same. Go to bed. He walks around for a while with my flashlight looking for reptiles. Quail trek down the road toward their evening drink in the mudhole and their roosts in the lemonadeberry (I think). There are clans, batches of maybe twenty. Quite a few. The whir when they rise, one sound from so many parts. The first night isn't a good sleep for either of us. Toward morning the little ants get into my bed and wake me by biting tender places like the underarm. He wakes unwell and lies all day in the shade. I make him tea and a good breakfast and for the rest leave him to his protein powder and grubby cookies. I climb a kopje and look around. From about 8 to about 5 it's hot, too hot to walk around. I have my mat spread under the little mesquite and have to keep moving it in a circle around it. All I have to read is Steinbeck's Log of the Sea of Cortez, which irritates me in its portentous male ponderings and oblivions. One of his favorite books, says Michael. He has left on the table a book by Merton which is hideous in its pious formulas about the Lord Jesus Christ and sacrifice and so on. What's bad in Steinbeck and Merton seems to be the same thing: escapism unacknowledged. In the evening we drove down the very steep grade into Borrego, where it was oppressively hot. He bummed cigarettes. A thin woman sitting outside the market gave him her packet. He was unhappy they were Virginia Slims. I was fed up with his free-loading and went to bed without saying goodnight. Set a little cup with pineapple juice 15' away to draw the ants. It mainly worked. In the morning I made tea but no breakfast and started cleaning up. Repacked the jeep carefully. We drove away. Five miles down the road he remembered he'd left his snake in a pillowcase hanging from a tree. We went back. Passive aggressive uncon, I was thinking. Needs to get service out of me one way or another. What was that expedition good for. I can go back to both of those places. I have photos. I have the second night, with its soft warm silence and safe largeness, sometimes very fine threads of scent, so fine I'd have to turn my head hunting for them. High desert. I made the decision on the way home to take the Black Canyon Road shortcut to Ramona. I loved the upper leg of Mesa Grande Road, the one I usually don't see. There was a vale I just caught a glimpse of, a shed-barn in a meadow, with a rectangle of maybe vegetable garden next to it. Tom Black's place, my dream of a responsible man, which I was sometimes needing to float within at Culp Valley in my good bed on the ground. Do I need that dream to help me feel young? So I can open to the places where I am, yes, I think. Michael was frightened of the blind corners on Black Canyon Road. He's afraid of head-on collisions. Will he ever take up where he left off, complete his MA, have naturalist work again? No, it says, he's wrecked, he's too irresponsible. He'll walk around loving snakes and chatting up women for coffees and cigarettes and rides as long as his good looks outweigh his dirtiness and neglect. I have something to resolve about him though. Ambivalence. True ambivalence, not neurotic. Ambivalence interests me, and should. Leave it at that.
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