Lilith walks with Tom, a neighbor on our writer's block

 

We had a guest walker today, Lilith and I, our neighbor Tom, writer, musician, father, husband, teacher. He used to think of AI as possibly benevolent, but now sees it as an engine of the apocalypse (my word). Tom is ostensibly a novelist, but one who generates much of his writing out of the material and sound of language. He teaches sci-fi and jazz literature at a local private school, one made nationally famous by its alumnus Pres. Obama. But he says he hardly reads novels now. He's tired of literature. I tell him about some recent losses, one complicated and the other less so. Later on, in a phone call with a poet friend, she said she thought language itself doesn't work any more. She spoke of losses, the losses of aging, of dying, and of communication. The loss of a belief in those national documents we used to find compelling. My friend is older, lives more or less alone, goes back to the Buddhist texts when she can. Tom's father, he realized this summer when he spent five weeks with him, is lonely. So many losses. But he renovates his two houses, making, remaking. Perhaps for his kids, maybe because it's something he knows how to do well that also passes the time. Tom's kids are good at things. One is studying in Japan this year, another is a physics whiz who wins the pole vault, and the third is happy. Two of them are deaf, including his daughter, with whom he writes music. She might minor in music, he says. We wonder about ambition, drive, where it gets you in the end. He reminds me I've had a good career. He asks about Tibetan Buddhism, having left a very strict zen center a while back. He still sits with friends. Lilith walked happily today; she likes guest walkers. For them she has pep in her step, even if she stops to sniff along the way. That is her career, as walker, diplomat, investigator, and companion. I desperately fear my loss of her.

Nolo stalls

On an ominous, gray morning, Lilith and I ran into the woman who sometimes walks backwards up hills; this time, she was walking forwards. She is not the subject of this walk, only its first sentence. We also ran into Auli`i, whose person is the retired aircraft mechanic obsessed with Ukraine. "I hear Lithuania is really worried that Putin might invade." I wondered out loud how Putin, who can't defeat Ukraine, could invade Europe, as well. "He probably wants to do it while Trump is still in power," he said. Like everyone these days, we got to talking about hurricane Nolo, sitting off the coast of Hawai`i island. "If a category 3 hit this island (O`ahu)," he said, "it would take years to fix things. We're out here in the middle of the Pacific, by ourselves; help can only arrive by air and by water. They can cut those off," he added, darkly. Later in the day, Nolo is finally turning to the much advertised left (closer to the American than to the the European model). But at 2 pm in Kane`ohe, we have a heavy evening sky, brief gusts of wind, humidity to cut like butter.

Lilith stalls

 

Lilith and I have walked hundreds of miles together, settling mostly into a three mile walk to the top of Valley of the Temples Cemetery and back, always under the gentle reach of the Ko`olau. I'll stop to take photos, she to sniff and pee and stare at chickens, cats, and mongooses. She'd rather hunt them, but a red leash prevents that. A few weeks ago, Lilith started to go on strike. The leash would suddenly tense. I'd look to see Lilith leaning back, her eyes directed at me, as if to say NO. At first I tried dragging her, but that wasn't good for her or for me. A few times, I let her go home, thinking she wasn't feeling well. Arthritis? Too many kitty poop snacks? Late middle age? Boredom? (That's it.)

 

I remembered that when we took walks with my creative writing students, I let her choose where we went. Strange perambulations we took around the UH campus, off sidewalks, nearly down storm drains, around old buildings. Why not do a variation on that again? So I began to let Lilith choose our way, at least some of the time. Today, we got to the cemetery, and then veered off on the grass, wandering to a tree at the top of the hill, then down and off to the dirt edge where the cemetery ends. No, she didn't want to get back on the usual course (whose treat at the end is the guys who spoil her silly), so we turned back, walking along the edge beside `Ahuimanu School (hearing the sounds of delighted children), stopping at my favorite paper bark tree, then crossing Kahekili to walk through the strip mall near the new instagram sensation, known for its sublime views. McDonald's, that is. We passed a group of water workers, air hammering holes in asphalt. One guy was wearing a Cardinals cap. "Are you?!" I asked. "No, but I like KC," he said. I was wearing my KC hat. It's a Negro Leagues Baseball Museum cap, I said. "The Monarchs?" That's it.

Death of a hired man

 

Lilith’s and my old friend from the cemetery, Uncle John, texted to say that his little brother died earlier this month. Jason had worked there, too, once telling me he’d looked at the photos in Lilith Walks. In this interview, which I found on-line, he talks about growing up a preacher’s kid in Kahuku on the North Shore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jowmBOlOB98 RIP.

Startles

My light heart conceals a squeaky toy. Dog throws heart in air. Dog digs and digs for toy. Now my light heart is half heart, half squeaky toy, scattered on a flowery carpet. I never understood carpet remnants; the carpets were always whole.

Dog refuses to walk, uses her eyes as lanterns. I’m her interpreter, but can’t tell what she’s saying. My light heart tries her rhythm, turning back to the door, landing on the flowery remnant. Dog’s nose is all I see through the open arm rest of the couch. Termites have munched the semi-fancy sculpted wood.

Lightheartedness presumes time lasts, that before and after time don’t match, but their awkwardness hurts no one. Lighthearted is not a word you’d use for Simone Weil. 1942 was a heavyhearted year. But even she must have known a puppy, tossing bone in unclouded air. Stilled time is light.

She preferred baseball to softball, because her hand fit the baseball more snuggly. A hard ball rests lightly in the palm. We gave out baseballs at our wedding; guests threw them, and gliders too. The air was heavy with moisture, but our hearts were light as arcs of flying objects beneath the matrimonial tree. The Cajun band played “take me out to the ballgame.”

Our vows were meant to last into extra innings. This was before they put a runner on second to start the inning, back when you had to earn your way to second, at least by stealing it. Our closer holds his heart in his hand, the one he placed on his heart before the game began. Flags in center field are blowing out as the ball is thrown, only seeming to rise as it arrives at home. No one stays there long.

He didn’t mean “lighthearted,” Rachel advised me, “but congenial.” Jen had said “Susan goes into the dark, the dark, the dark,” and I almost laughed to hear her performance of the word. It’s gray outside and the trees are still. We’ve got our hurricane remnants. Cut your carpet up and fly!

 

--for Larry & Lily 

 

 

 

Startles: philo-fantasizing

Each elegy is about us; hence our discomfort with its details. Privacy’s a shield for the reader more than the subject, who “will be dead for a long time,” as Anne says. To leave in chaos is a kind of invisibility cloak. The death of a friend leaves a debt, if only you can find the bank account. Someone will pay the utilities.

Proceed along this path, finding places where brown leaves bleed yellow light, or where paperbark peels into shadow, or where palms stick out their pollinated tongues to the bees. In grief, I’m told, nature offers us solace. But we’ve had two hurricanes this month, three Kona lows this year, storms without name that made our ceilings into topo maps. Dry wall’s decreation gives us distraction, like the portrait of a lion on a gynecologist’s ceiling. I love dead leaves, not dead friends.

Follow the light through this patch of rain forest, geometries of large green leaves held over twigs. Asemic, this forest’s language. Can we read it the way we read our dead friend’s essays, for the shade they might cast on our friendship? A tentative series of vertical lines, fraktur that’s at once fracture and a grid for syntax. Italian sentences walk backwards, from mystery to resolution, hiding their punch lines at the end.

Stories are reputed to develop empathy, the palliative effect of narrative on  fractured synapses. My friend didn’t understand why stories might be a problem. Assume there’s a progression from beginning to middle to end, even in Hopscotch. There’s no end to this life, or the end’s as imperfect as the life. She refused help, until no one offered it any more.

Because “help” suggests weakness, and that’s disallowed in a survivor of her parents’ flight from Mao. And other traumas I will leave out, for privacy’s sake. Diaspora doesn’t choose its trajectory, or its shift in words. Some part of origin remains as sacred, however beautiful the breaks in clay. When she told a friend that she’d “saved her life,” the friend had no idea what she meant.

I’ve come to understand my mother’s retreats into self, her silences, her willingness to hurt rather than to be hurt. What saves the child sometimes kills the adult. Her shield grows knives inside, so each defense causes a wound. To lose a self is not to be self-less. It’s to be a faint pattern on a carpet, a computer left on in the dark, a cat waiting to be saved.

 

A 9/11 rerun from the blog

 I don't remember the novel. I can't hold onto plots. But I vaguely remember having written this essay about Don DeLillo's book, Falling Man, inspired by the photograph of someone we now know was Jonathan Briley, sound engineer, falling from one of the twin towers. DeLillo connected the event to Alzheimer's in ways that made sense to me then, and now that I reread my response: https://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2011/05/don-delillos-falling-man-911-alzheimers.html