One Love,This Time

And there I have lived ever since, solitary and in wonder, wondering day and night, never a moment without wonder … not for 5 minutes will I be distracted from the wonder.

— Binx Bolling (Percy, 1961)

There were glimmers of it early in my life. I have always tended to wander a bit. And, from time to time, I become engulfed in wonder. Something catches my attention—a leaf, a star, the last trace of a rainbow recently faded, a drop of water on a windowsill, a small stone at the edge of a path, the light flash of a memory, sunlight shimmering on a lake, the song of the wind, the trill of a Cardinal in my neighbor’s dogwood, the howling chorus of my dogs singing to a passing cat, a guitar strumming somewhere in the distance. And I stand, transfixed, caught up in wonder. Sometimes I seek it, climbing high into the mountains, or driving to the beach, looking to be captured by the light, by the openness of the world, by the soft song of a stream, by the swaying of an old tree, by what’s around the next bend in the trail, by the ripples in sand on the shore, or by the author’s magic working on the pages of a book.

Like Binx Bolling, Walker Percy’s “moviegoer,” I am on a search. I poke around the neighborhood to see what turns up. But my favorite moments are when I stumble upon it, caught by surprise, falling into that moment of wonder.

Fall, 1963: I’m in first grade. I look across the room and she catches my eye. And there it is: I am full of wonder. All these years later, I still remember that smooth cheek, lightly laced with little veins almost rising to the surface, that golden hair, those green-gray eyes. My first crush: Phyllis Green. I never speak to her, but for that entire year, I look upon her in wonder, from afar. I think about what it would be like to rub my hand across that cheek. I dream about it.

Years later, as a transfer student at the University of Colorado, I find myself needing a 1-credit college course in humanities. I close my eyes, and randomly point at the list of available courses. My finger lands on “Acting 1”. On the first day of class, I wander through the labyrinthine halls of the Theatre Building and into the black box studio. I pause at the door, and there, all the way across the room, stands the love of my life. From here, I swear it looks like she glows, like a soft light radiates upward and outward from her. Or is it that the light just lands on her like no other? And an epiphany hits me, as quickly and as surely as I have ever known anything: That’s her. That’s her. That’s who I am supposed to be with.

The thing is this: The year is 1980, the same year Laurel Richardson’s love-story-poems about her life with Ernest Lockridge start. Susan and I have been together ever since. And though Ernest has shuffled off his mortal coil, I know he and Laurel are still together, in ways that perhaps only poetry can reveal. I know this because of how I feel, in my bones, every day, what it’s like to share that kind of intimacy with a life-partner.

There’s another small connection between Dr. Richardson and me, a thread I want to touch before going on with this essay. Ernest Lockridge painted the original oil on canvas—a work titled “Out and About”—that so beautifully served as the cover of my book, Accidental Ethnography: An Inquiry into Family Secrecy (Poulos, 2009), a book which was, after all, about going out and about, looking for secrets. And though I never met him, I have always felt a connection there.

I first met Laurel Richardson on the page, as many of us did (Richardson, 2000). And then I met her in the flesh at ICQI, walking with her and Bud Goodall to lunch one day (Poulos, 2016). And again at her workshop the next year. Her writing, her author’s voice, has always had me all caught up in wonder. And here, now, in this reading of her poetry, I still feel the wonder that caught me at the first light of today. And you can feel, as you read, the burning of the kind of love that, when stolen away by the vicissitudes of illness, decline, and loss, can only turn to words, to poetry. And this turns me back to my life-partner, who I feel I could not bear to lose. Somehow, the only way I can read this poetry is through the lens of my own marriage.

I see you

You see into me

And I wander, in wonder

Knowing you can complete my sentences

And I yours

And we ride along together, Through the bumps and bruises and the daily

Moments of joy

Moments of sorrow

Is this what they call love?

What Robert Johnson calls “stirring the oatmeal love?”

Yes.

We talk often about our “wavelength”. We sometimes ride it together, sometimes drift away. But it is ours. And after all these years—42 of them, yes!—we still make each other laugh. Some days, you have a sort of anomia: You get a word that’s close, but not quite. This is not an aging thing, or an illness thing; you’ve always had it. A kind of dyslexia of the mouth. And yet, I know what you mean (almost) immediately. I only skip a single beat, as I search for the word. Sometimes, I open my mouth to speak, and you join me in a chorus.

We see things from different angles, but they complement each other. You are an artist; I am a writer. Your medium is liquid color; mine is black ink on a white page. You make shapes with brushes; I shape words with fingers skipping wildly across a keyboard.

Today, I read you some of Laurel’s poems, from the first part, from before the breakdown. I always want to read in the author’s voice, by the way, but I can’t do her voice.

But you listen intently, and you say: Yes, that’s it.

And I say: It is like that, isn’t it?

And you say: It is and it isn’t, right?

And I say: Yes. It is and is not.

And then I read more, from the painful pages that unfold in the wake of Lewy Body Dementia, in the gripping of a once-vibrant mind in a vice of confusion and frustration and wildly twisted primal urges and fragmented, slipping memories. And we both know how hard it is to witness that, to be present for the slow free fall of a human into darkness. Your mom had some kind of Alzheimer’s. For her it was loops in the present. No memory of what was just said. Fully intact memories of early childhood. But nothing in the now.

And then you say: Dementia is a cruel master.

And I say: A deeply human, tragic condition, a maelstrom of human fragility. A mind cast adrift by weird little protein deposits. A world shattered. A dream falling into night terrors.

And you say: I believe it would make me wake up in a cold sweat, shivering wildly, if it happened to you, or to me. Either way.

And I say: Either way…

As I read Laurel’s pages, crafted as a fragmented story-poem of love and alienation, I feel the heat of it, I feel the heart of it. I feel the agony, the turmoil. I hear the echoes of fragmented memory, of shattered dreams, of life coming apart at the seams. I feel the pain of two broken hearts in the sad trajectory of a breaking/broken/whirling/swirling mind. I see the traces of a human shell who does not wish to inhabit this space, but cannot not live it out, can’t break his own fall. And I see a loving, tormented partner, living out the last days of a long life-story together.

And I find myself wondering about memory, about how the psychologists say that memory is the glue that holds our human experience together, how memory is the basis of story, but how memory is also fickle and unreliable and often fragmented, flashy at times, fading at others. And then I think of how maybe poetry, which is more fickle, less linear than prose, could be the only way to put these moments, those memories of fading memory, into words.

And then she writes, “I’m tired of death.” And I hear the echoes in my own life. Family and friends and death: four in 2 years; seven in 11 months; five in 3 months; two in 4 months. Waves of sorrow, waves of loss. I sometimes think I can’t take any more. Dad is now gone. Are mom and brother on their way? Where am I in this line of dominoes? I just turned 64, and I feel more alive than I have in years. But…you never know where life might take you. You never know when death might take you.

And her poem shouts to Death: “Go away! Don’t come back!” And I think of the letter I wrote to Death after my dad shuffled off his mortal coil. I put it more crudely. I closed that letter like this: So, Death, you see? You did not win. I still think you’re an asshole. But I know how to beat you. Maybe someday I’ll just accept you. Maybe one day we’ll be friends. I rather doubt it. But maybe, if I become the pastoral-witty-gentle-frolicking-graceful human I aspire to be, we can become friends. Meanwhile, why don’t you just piss off?

But sometimes death does win, if only for a few moments, while I wail and keen and cry out in pain at the loss of what was, at the pain of what might have been, and at the pain of what happened but never should have happened. Some things should just not be. As David Foster Wallace (1996) put it, I have “a few administrative bones to pick with God.” And I add: If there is a God.

But then something funny dawns on me as I read on. The cycle of death is a falling apart, followed by putting the pieces back together, in a new form. Life is like that game I used to pass many hours in my childhood, building houses out of cards. I would build elaborate structures, which would stand for a while, and then come crashing down, at the flutter of a breeze, or a miscued hand. And I would start over, each time building a new edifice. Though all were relatively fragile, each was unique. When Dad fell into the chasm of death, the ground shifted under my feet. The house fell. And then, day by day, I crafted a life without him in it. It looks different, sometimes less painful, sometimes sadder than sad, sometimes joyous. I hang on to the memories of the good times.

And I walk in wonder, tacking back and forth between

LIFE (Oh, life! Glorious life! Take me for a ride!)

and

DEATH (“Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”).

And I wonder about the words we find. Where do they come from?

And I wonder at the darkness of the deep night.

And I wonder at the early morning light.

And I wonder at how words unfurl across the page, not guided by me, but leading me along, a willing participant.

And I wonder at the gentle wagging of my dog’s tail.

And I wonder at the drop of dew on that flower over there.

And I wonder at my fingers trying, at this age, to tame the strings of a guitar, starting from scratch, with no musical experience.

And I wonder at how our sons, now men, are carving out their beautiful destinies.

And I wonder at how much I love you, my sweet Susana.

And, engulfed in wonder, I find I cannot think of life without you.

But I do not have to.

Not now.

For now, I’ll just breathe in each day, and write my way through.

And so, again, I start to wander, and somehow, I become engulfed in wonder once again. Something catches my attention—a leaf, a star, the last trace of a rainbow recently faded, a drop of water on a windowsill, a small stone at the edge of a path, the light flash of a memory, sunlight shimmering on a lake, the song of the wind, the trill of a Cardinal in my neighbor’s dogwood, the howling chorus of my dogs singing to a passing cat, a guitar strumming somewhere in the distance. And I stand, transfixed, caught up in wonder. Sometimes I seek it, climbing high into the mountains, or driving to the beach, looking to be captured by the light, by the openness of the world, by the soft song of a stream, by the swaying of an old tree, by what’s around the next bend in the trail, by the ripples in sand on the shore, or by the author’s magic working on the pages of a book.

And I breathe, and I write my way through another day.