Because you didn't ask
The memories rise unbidden – they are always rising, bubbles of air surging from the depths to the surface of the sea; or stones borne skyward in similar offering, caught in the slow and seasonal currents of frost in farmer’s fields – as if by some anti-gravitational magic, the memories rise out of some ancient volume of a life and appear as a surprise, a bubble to burst, a stone weighing the open hands of the mind.
The morning sounds of my grandmother’s sister, Hazel, as she moves about the kitchen, July of 1969. I have just woken from a dream, but nothing in me moves, not even my eyelids have fluttered to open; I am warm and silent in my bed.
Hazel is alone in the mornings, because Olaf has gone to work his several jobs. He manages the local grain co-op, and the laundromat, and he sows grain on their acreage, part of a sea of green in which the nine square blocks of this North Dakota town floats like a tiny atoll. Olaf sprays the fields with chemicals which raise yield and reduce insects, and which will eventually kill him – five short years after this quiet summer morning.
Just days before, around my ninth birthday, I watched Neil Armstrong step from a ladder and kick up a silent puff of dust from the surface of the Moon. There was a breathless moment just before he stepped down, there were his famous words, and through the black and white image and the static of the transmission, a traveler heart stepped out of this world and stood looking through a stranger’s visor at the blue-green jewel that was home.
There is a mourning dove on the wire outside my bedroom window, singing Who…? Who… who… who, asking the name of the lost? Why does her call sound so sad, what is it we hear in her words that stands, unspoken, in ourselves? On the AM radio they are wrapping up the Grain Futures, and I haven’t moved, I am not even sure I am awake. Hazel puts water to heat on the stove, a clank and scrape of metal against the metal burner. There are no other noises; the town is small, and Nature is huge around us, the sky goes on forever, north to Canada, west to the Rockies. Into the silence, a song comes on the radio.
I think it was on the radio… or was it part of my dream? It was so quiet, it slipped inside of me like a hand softly taking your hand. It was a sad song; it was a heartbreaking song. It broke the heart with beauty, it wasn’t angry or jealous or vengeful, it wasn’t cocky or smart or bluesy. It was a man’s voice, singing with a woman’s heart, with such love and longing and loss, of such beauty and the beauty gone…
There I was, in the heart of the North Dakota grasslands, in the home of my childless relatives, as this music poured in and poured in, my eyes closed it came in until there was nothing in the whole world but this music, until the water and the light of it broke a seawall inside of me, and I began to weep, weep silently there in my bed, for what I didn’t know, for everything, while Hazel steeped the coffee and buttered toast for my breakfast, while Olaf went about the gentle and mundane tasks that on that day it turns out was near the end of his life, while the mourning dove sang Who? Who? and the green Earth rolled round to face the sun again; tears larger and deeper than nine years of life falling from me as I clutched the pillow to my heart with all of my strength, buried my open mouth in its folds so the sound wouldn’t reach the kitchen, wept while the song ended and wept because it ended, learned the meaning of poignant before I knew of the word, wept until the melody and the voice stopped echoing in my thoughts.
My pillow was wet and my eyes red. My heart was wrung out and quiet. I lay still with my eyes open and took in the small mementos of a life – not mine – that filled the guest room. I lay while my breath returned to normal, with the acrid taste of tears in the back of my throat, then slid out of bed and opened the door to the kitchen.
-- Good morning, Hazel.
The thought rises unbidden as I sip a cup of coffee with my friend Manny, at a shop in town, comes as fully into my body as though I just lived it, a fullness which takes a second, less than a second, to be realized. Do we imagine these voices and places live in us only when revealed again to our conscious self? Certainly not the case. I am the present and I am every ray of sun that has touched me.
Tonight my Christmas Tree is still lit, and my daughter is asleep upstairs. She is asleep tonight, though many nights the currents of emotion in her nine years of life have left her anxious and clinging. What are the sources of her unspent tears? What stones are beginning their slow rise to her hands? And what ocean’s air breaks the surface of the waves?