May 2010 Archives
It is coming at me in the form of physical objects. And while the objects are clear enough, the "it" isn't. The phenomenon is constant, like a language, a rhythm. Opening the kitchen cabinet to retrieve a soup bowl, there they are the Tuscan bowls, left over from a 20-year-old vacation with the first wife. They have long been treated like treasured objects, this particular dinnerware. The first wife, and let us leave her name a blank, carried them on as hand baggage, holding them on her lap at times during our flights back to the States. They are hardly valuable, and, in fact, are now healthily chipped and broken in, but they were exotic in their day. And I have mindlessly carried on the tradition of storing them in some special place, lest they get broken. Until just now. When mindfulness came into the mind, and I let it go. After two decades, it is time to let the Tuscan bowls fend for themselves among the general plates and glasses. More to the point, the wife is long gone, and so are her concerns. So what is my true stance regarding the Tuscan bowls? There are just splendid, mildly cracked, as was the wife, and this is another mortal epoch. Each only lasts a few years, as years themselves have shown.
Objects. Tom, my landlord, grew quite agitated this afternoon with the discovery in the rubbish bin. Very little passes his scrutiny, and somehow he had noted the contents of recent trash. Passports. Driver's licenses. I could see the alarm in his face, and so followed him out to the carport. There they were, in one of the mixed-paper recycling bins, a total of four of Marlou's old, canceled passports. Oh, yes, I clucked disapprovingly, no, no, these were not meant to be out here in this particular bin in Menlo Park, California, but should be appropriately shredded, safely, and permanently. Let me take care of it, I told Tom.
I make every effort to bond with my landlord regarding worldview. This bond either derives from my 17 years without a rent increase, or is the cause of it. I cannot say. Just a minute, Tom told me, looking for the driver's licenses. He was certain he had seen them. And on this point I was naturally in total agreement. Not the sort of thing to bandy about, permission to drive in the great state of California...the latter, I predict, heading for dismal transformation within a few years, one that Marlou is probably better off missing. The driver's licenses are themselves missing, it turns out. But there's something else, Marlou's high school diploma.
These things have recently turned up in the rubbish, because Marlou's mom put them there. Being in the midst of true grief, she is unsentimental. Joan lets go of Marlou's old things, deepening her sorrow with each carton of effects. And she has thrown them out, in the manner of someone of her generation, in the trash, and never mind the shredder. I rescue these documents from the recycle bin, unclear about why, next steps vague. Joan is home in Hawaii now. I am here. And they are a burden, old stuff, each demanding a response, each delivering a reminder. Remains. More remains remaining.
There are also found objects. What was good enough for Apollinaire is good enough for me. And who has found whom? As Marlou's items flow out the door and toward oblivion, some get snagged in the current...and here they are. The gold embossed diploma of graduation of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Being 'found worthy in character and citizenship,' Marlou has been ushered out the door of North Hollywood High School. With high honors, yet. The physical packaging and presentation of this diploma is quite a production. The thing could have been issued yesterday. I hold it in my hand with its embossed gold-type-on-black-leatherette cover, appreciating the high moment in a budding life. Surely such a milestone document must be saved. And here is the sad part. It must go. It does not belong anywhere, anymore. Marlou's ashes needed to briefly stain the Pacific Ocean, dispersing north and south. And this diploma needs a similar destiny, currently unclear. And there are the passports.
Four of them. The obvious question: who keeps old passports? Which isn't a question in Marlou's case, for she held onto old everything. Who would keep notes from university courses from four decades ago? No, the real question is why are they on my desk? Who is really holding onto the past?
And does anyone really know anyone, ever?
Here is Marlou's visa for her year in France, Los Angeles vice-Consul Jean Leray's own personal signature testifying to this. She got around. Two trips to Greece rubberstamped. Hmmmm. I only recall hearing about one trip there, the ferry from Brindisi figuring prominently. Perhaps she had a fling. I hope so. Marlou felt the pressures of propriety most acutely, and these travels must have been among her most free moments. And here she is, on an earlier passport page, arriving at Templelhof, coming or going from her high school summer with a German family. I had forgotten that at one point American passports were green.
Marlou had beautiful eyes, slightly crossed in this 1967 photo. By the mid-70s, her eyes look a bit sadder, but I may be reading this in. Briefly puzzling this stamp from Haneda Airport, Tokyo. Now I remember. She went out with an Air Force guy. I vaguely recall that she followed him here. How long was she there? The Air Force guy had a drinking problem, Marlou said. Not much travel in the 1970s. The passport expired without seeing a lot of action.
By the mid-80s, she was on the go. Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Was that her birdwatching trip? Whoops. I overestimated this decade. This was it, the one trip. She looks downright perky in her passport photo, a beautiful woman in her 30s. Her prime, one might say. As a Smith, her married name, she looks oddly petite in the next passport. Her hair is short, collar lacy and high. Oh, yes, the two Smiths went to France. And in the early 90s Marlou went to Bangkok. Malaysia. Then, post-divorce, Santiago, Chile. Then Japan on a group excursion. Then back to visit her childhood friend from Bangkok. And Laos, with her cousin Betsy. No surprises. In fact, the general course of her life in some ways echoes my own. Solitude and stasis, then a go at marriage, then divorce and independent journeying. The passports form a neat pile, Marlou's report cards from UC Davis at the bottom. And now what?
I can't quite run this stuff through the shredder. It's only a small pile, after all. It can sit on my desk a while longer. The more vexing problem is, or was, what to do with the plastic container from the crematorium. There is still a trace of Marlou's ashes in there, I suppose. A bit of reverence seems due. And I have decided what that is. Recycling. Marlou wasn't much on such liberal-minded practices, finding them harmless at best. But that was the living, corporeal Marlou. Who knows what perspective she could be said to have now, having been recycled into the Pacific Ocean? For I think merging with other things plastic, being melted down and converted into something else...that's a good destiny for us all.
I can feel it, a squeeze, a calendar force exerted backwards from 3 June, my departure date for Britain. I need this, need the pressure and the structure that derives from it. For the Miss Haversham effect seems most pronounced at this moment, piles everywhere, things I cannot find, a jumble of past and present, photo of Marlou and me from some better time piled atop the corner of my nephew's graduation photo, bicycle reflectors underneath that, the recently discovered copy of the marriage license at the bottom of the pile, the whole thing anchored by a bag of coins, British and American, inexplicably combined in one plastic bag. Things are in a sorry state.
Behind all this, I see a depressive state. Things are not only going to seed about my apartment, there are seedy. And there is the other thing about seeds, that their mission is new life. Which is why I really must have a go at cleaning my apartment. My brother is around. There is no time like the present. Except tomorrow, which is distinctly better, my capacity for pawing through objects being low at all times, even lower now.
Hulk Hogan and the Incredible Razor. I think these are the names of the wrestlers Elliot, Marlou's nephew, recently introduced me to in his spectacular DVD set. I am sure I have the wrestlers' names wrong, but this is close enough. It's as close as I'm likely to get to an actual wrestling match, so the video version was quite welcome. There is a world out there. People crowd into arenas for all sorts of purposes, and these exhibitions of muscular ferocity, pain endurance, cheap theatrics and caricatured morality make as much sense as many other things. I tend to retreat from the greater world under the best of circumstances, but now I was part of an audience of three, learning about what people do with a Saturday night in Oakland or Jacksonville or Detroit. Learning anything is good. Learning from younger people is really good. Learning to stay open and curious is very good, and after a week of ashes scattering and personal effects sorting, it seems to be all there is.
Death, I am learning, is nothing to fear. On the other hand, it is nothing to ignore. Particularly its mysteries. One of which involves the handling of it, the picking up and inspecting and touching and curious going over its stuff. For it drifts around, death does, moving like a fog, permeating and giving off its own sense of impersonal curiosity. It likes stasis, and so settles over things, damping them harmlessly but protractedly, time being absent. Which is what separates the living from the dead, in purely functional terms. And so impels me to disturb the dust, the invisible nonexistent dust, that has settled over the pile of mail on the corner of my desk which, a bit of shifting will reveal to be perhaps five months old. In fact, it is a relief to more or less estimate the life of the mail pile, giving me the sense that I have not totally lost control of everything, and grateful for the landmark nature of my UK journeys. The last ended in mid-January. Surely the mail pile dates from after that point. Surely.
Marlou's photos. They fill the entire surface of her desk in the living room, arranged in an arc, a display that dominates that portion of my, formally our, apartment. It has occurred to me that at some point they must be put away, given a resting place, pulled into the wings to free the stage for action. But what was once an idea is now gathering force, becoming an action. It is as though the photos are moving themselves. I'm not quite ready to touch them until they tell me where they are going, but this seems imminent. The corner of my own desk, perhaps, for one. No room for the others. They seem to be moving toward a drawer. They are moving faster now that 3 June is moving closer. The big squeeze.
Books. Reading them seems almost possible. In fact, I can envision a total ban on book purchase, followed by the sealing off of all doors, with the rest of my life spent reading what is left of My Collection...which will never get finished. Perhaps the most difficult part being the last. I am conscious of what remained undone in Marlou's life. To me, this means the eternal process of manifesting who we are. Where was she in this process, and what would have unfolded with more time? In this way, I come to grips with my own life, what I have learned and haven't, and the part that will remain undone. I have spent much of my life frustrated by my losses, and now it is time for something else.
Spring cleaning. There is a tradition, after all. And it is not all about throwing things away, storing them, filing and forgetting. It's also about discovery. I am just about to load my recently unearthed CD of 'The Little Mermaid' into the iPod for exercise music. Why does a 63-year-old man possess a 20-year-old copy of 'Little Mermaid?' Because he liked it and likes it. The score is utterly infectious, doing for me what exhibition wrestling may do for others. Consider these immortal lyrics.
Under the sea
Under the sea
Darling it's better
Down where it's wetter
Take it from me
Up on the shore they work all day
Out in the sun they slave away
While we devotin'
Full time to floatin'
Under the sea
If the general movement is downward, into the earth, then the afternoon has been about that. Nathan, Marlou's nephew, tackled the garden's most unpleasant task with exemplary relish. I have committed myself to home composting of all kitchen vegetable waste, sunk a surprising amount of money
into a tumbling plastic bin geared to this purpose, and am now one green and environmentally correct quadriplegic. As for the compost tumbler, it has taken everything thrown into its maw without quavering, yet without clear result. From one perspective, the little thing is amazing. Months of onion skins, old salad, rotten fruit, forgotten celery stalks, avocado peels, limp carrots and dead flowers have found their way out my front door, down the sidewalk and into the compost tumbler. According to the instructions, all one has to do is keep the stuff moist and keep rotating the contents. Actually, tumbling the contents, the container being mounted on a base with roller wheels.
On and on, the dumping has gone. Some baby potatoes I overlooked in the refrigerator had turned green and, too bad, out they went, out the door, down the sidewalk and into the compost tumbler. There should be no smell, the instructions explain. Which is unfortunate, for the tumbler is full of smelly, rotten stuff, ever condensing in quantity, ever decomposing, until...what? After months of this, all I have is a bunch of rotten stuff. What is compost, anyway? Not this stuff, for no self-respecting shopper would proudly cart home a bag of my tumbler's contents for the wife's roses. And yet, Nathan is here, it is a Friday afternoon, and he seems more than willing to move this compost to its next stage.
My garden is overgrown. The latter is, of course, entirely subjective. What I mean is that much of its contents are unknown to me, and the result is a botanical overpopulation. Cabbage, for example, is one thing at the Safeway. In the garden, it is a sprawling monster, surreal leaves splayed in all directions, muttering 'feed me, feed me.' I am certain it would not pass up a little blood. Something makes red cabbage red, after all. I planted five seedlings, far too close together, and everything else is getting squeezed out of of the bed. In the end, there may be five heads of cabbage, enough for several coleslaws, stirfries, or whatever. But, and this is the point, there is no room to work the garden. That's why Nathan proved so valuable, pulling back the worst of the snail-damaged cabbage leaves to expose some actual diggable soil. He managed a hole here, a hole there, and filled them all with bits of the compost tumbler's contents. I was most grateful.
We came to Marlou's patch. Let us call it that, a patch. Perhaps a zone. Even a shrine. No, a patch. Yes, it is the place where Joan and I scattered some of Marlou's ashes...no, that is the ceremonial term. We took a trowel and dug in some of the powdery, splintery gray stuff, covering the results with soil. And now, two days later, Nathan and I are intent on desecration, it seems. We are taking the smelliest shovelfuls from the compost tumbler and digging them in here, right beside Marlou's bone fragments and her reduced minerals.
Letting go involves such little acts. I can see it now, making small choices, simple abandonments. Yes, no one was watching. But I was watching, watching myself decide what to do about this patch of ground. It took something like faith to believe that the putrid contents of my compost maker should not be held to account. In fact, they were teeming with life, longing to be claimed by the soil, worms celebrating, bacteria shouting, the whole biological clamor absolutely deafening if you happen to live underground. This being where we are all headed, rot being the pejorative term, decomposition, biochemical reordering and biological uptake being a much more pleasant, not to mention accurate, phrasing. And I had not intended this practical moment of emptying the compost, using Nathan's help, enriching the soil, as a metaphysical exercise, but so things go these days.
The only way to deal with the dreaded substance was to open the silly plastic box and have a go at the contents. A double sense permeated the process. It was what it was and most distinctly wasn't what it was, and therefore what was it? It was a velvet bag with a drawstring, rather on the cheap side. And within was an impressively solid brown plastic box. Three bricks would have occupied the space, and they would have weighed about the same. It was time to open the damn thing, it really was. Events were moving swiftly now, the opening had long been avoided, although contemplated, in fact, dreaded. And so there we were, Marlou's mother and me fussing outside by my raised beds, overhung by rampant and inappropriately blooming brussels sprouts, an unstoppable crop of lettuce, rampaging garlic and onions and mysteriously gnawed marigolds, probably victims of a snail.
Neither of us could open the box containing Marlou's ashes. Joan has mild arthritis, I have advanced quadriplegia, and we are both short on daughters and wives, respectively. Oh, there's something wet. Joan's remark mildly unnerved me, my fear being that something might be leaking from the box from the crematorium, that has sat on my pantry shelf for more than a year. But the wetness came from elsewhere. Gardens discharge wetness on a regular basis, I told myself, and the two of us were still fumbling with the plastic lid. And it took two. I divined the mechanics of the lid, and Joan got a knife to pry it up and off. A wad of packing paper, then a plastic bag with a metal seal on the taped closure. This had been an official California body incineration, and to prove it we had documents taped to the box and the stamped coin of the mortuary realm. As I say, every moment was unfolding with a double sense, the utter silliness of bureaucracies superimposed on top of whether it did or did not matter that this bodily matter was Marlou's. Ashes being quite indistinguishable from ashes, trust me. And at least Joan was game. I wanted to pour bits of her daughter next to the tomatoes, in the last open space available in my crowded botany. And so we were, Joan having made a small hole in the bag with a pairing knife. And there she went, Marlou, gray and powdery with small sharp flakes on the order of finely shredded coconut.
"That's enough." Joan's remark ringing on more levels than the human mind can grasp, all centering around the meaning of what constitutes enough ash. Or enough exposure to ash and its attendant reminders. And who decided how much was enough. And what would too much look like? Or not enough? And considerably more, but this is what we humans do, we grasp at what little control we have over life's deepest currents, as unstoppable as the Gulfstream. That's enough. I dug Marlou into the ground, following Joan's lead. This was her daughter, someone she had birthed, nursed, potty trained, loved. Marlou recalled taking afternoon naps as a three-year-old with her mother, waking early and lifting Joan's eyelids to...see what was happening, get things moving...I don't know that part. I do know that the story is full of gentleness and intimacy on both sides, qualities that ultimately transferred to me in some degree. For which I am most grateful. And which leads me to watch Joan burying her daughter's ashes, having done the same with her son's, and I quite agree, that's enough.
The in-laws, Dick and Joan, invited their grandsons to California for this occasion, the one set for the morning. Naturally, United Airlines intervened with a diversion from Des Moines to Boise, Idaho, via Denver, and on to San Francisco, late. When the young men arrive from the airport, at the wheel of a vast and mighty 10-passenger van, I have in some moment of madness reserved for them through Avis, there is tension in my apartment. We are making sandwiches, not quite agreeing on whether we shall eat them in transit or quickly at the table. For we are departing tonight, all of us, for Monterey Bay, overnighting in a motel. And it is late. Making sandwiches involves too many plots and subplots for my small kitchen. I want the bran bread. The grandsons, Elliot and Nathan, are alleged to want white. I don't want pastrami, but I am getting it anyway. I tried to put the lettuce on myself, dropping a handful on the kitchen floor. In the end, we briefly gather at the table, eat our food, and resume our journeys. I and the in-laws only returned yesterday from Elliot's graduation in Des Moines. Denver Airport has also figured prominently in my recent experience.
A night drive. My collapsible electric wheelchair does not quite fit in this massive van in the way I had expected. The van is full of seats, for 10 people at least. Somehow, viewing this in the Internet, I had imagined something else, a big baggage space in the back, like the airport shuttles. Which, upon reflection, was madness, but a certain level of madness had prevailed for days. Marlou's presence on my pantry shelf had truly haunted me, sitting there in its remarkably heavy and condensed mineral form. I wondered what the remains had looked like after their burning. One gets the sense of this, a good sense from Truffaut's 'Jules and Jim,' complete with someone grinding the incinerated bones into an urn. And there it was, a human life, reduced to the mineral ash one might expect from a burned tree, flinty bone bits notwithstanding. And this was sad. But why? And what happened to the rest of Marlou's remains, now dispersed as smoke? Did I breathe in a bit? And, if so, would this be good or bad? Are such thoughts morbid? And what does 'morbid' mean? Death-obsessed? Perhaps, and why not?
For me, this has been a starting point. Marlou is now gray and powdery and crunchy. As will I be someday. Unless I insist on being buried in someone's vegetable garden. My own would be nice, except that it could hardly be said to be mine at that point. Creepy. Disturbing. That's the double sense of the box contents unopened. Now, poured about the garden, they are revealed to be ashes. And the swift drive down Highway 101 leads to the Comfort Inn where I expect little comfort. Outside, and across the freeway are the sand dunes of southern Monterey Bay. Inside, and across the bed from the television, lies a sleepless quadriplegic. He is worried. He is worried about the toilet. It is too low. He fears that in the morning, the day for so much planning has been expended, he will sit upon the toilet and will not be able to stand. A descent without a rise. Trapped. It is 4 AM. Sleepless in the Comfort Inn.
At 6 AM, I rise and uncharacteristically go about giving myself some comfort. I read, with great difficulty in the dawn light, the number on the telephone at my bedside. I enter the hotel's number into my mobile phone and place it by the toilet. I unlock the door to the room and leave it ajar. If I am trapped on the toilet, I will phone for help, that is to say, one of Marlou's nephews, Nathan or Elliot, in the adjoining room. Seated on the toilet, the picture brightens. There turns out to be a railing right behind that affords excellent grip. I have gotten a grip. Better, I have given myself a grip. Or Marlou has given me one...or helped me in the process of giving myself one.
So, we are up and out the motel door, driving toward the working harbor at Moss Landing, the midpoint of Monterey Bay. I have dressed for the worst of the Humboldt current and its notoriously arctic waters, but the day is balmy. My wheelchair threatens to go out of control on the steep metal ramp to the wharf, but Nathan and Elliot stand by, poised to grab my wheels. I am halfway to the boat before I realize that everything seems to be rocking because everything is rocking. The dock is floating, tilting this way and that, and before the fear can take over, the captain of the Sanctuary has announced himself. There is no time to waste.
Good that I have risen from my wheelchair and announced myself willing to climb the three wooden steps on the dock. A similar portable affair of three plastic wooden steps sits on the boat deck. Up, over the boat's railing, down. How are we going to do this, asks the captain? God only knows, I tell him. It takes three people, Elliot, Nathan and the skipper, to swarm around from one quadriplegic limb to the next, just to get me up the steps. It takes ingenuity to get my paralyzed right leg over the rail. I really can't recall how I got down. Collapsing on a fiberglass bench, feeling my torso weave with the swell, I take in the diesel scent of the engine starting, the boat reversing out of its berth.
Moss Landing sits in the shadow of an enormous powerplant, smokestacks visible for 10 miles in any direction. Its boats are mostly of the fishing variety, large and serious, laden with hoists and booms, rusty in places, painted for wear, not show. We putt-putt through this outpost of the Pacific fleet, water rippling, morning quiet. Old creosoted pilings here and there, staring up at decks. Something shimmers in the water and a head glistens. A sea lion. I yell to Nathan, the nephew most tuned into nature. A cormorant dives straight into the water. As for Nathan, he has two sea lions lounging on his side of the boat. In the narrow channel these sea creatures are only a couple of meters away. A barking sound, almost a satire on a seal, but it is a seal. And up on the pilings a chorus of sea lions perch on their wooden balcony. We are rounding a corner, passing a large gray and industrial looking fishing vessel, pointing toward the open sea. Pacific brown pelicans swoop right beside the boat, inches above the water. Something furry on the surface. My God, a rare Pacific otter. It curves and dives into the depths. Well, at least I have seen one. No, two. And this second one is floating on his back in the harbor water smashing an abalone shell on its belly with a rock. Otters are famous for this, but they are famous for doing this in nature films on television. And this isn't a documentary, but real life, I think. A blue heron flies by with a fish wriggling, impaled on its beak.
Open sea, and the captain opens the throttle. We bounce over the waves, Monterey shoreline receding. Until we stop. The skipper, a discreet guy, explains that he is turning the stern away from the wind. This is our chance. Dick and the two young men go to work on the box. I suggest that this is time to say something, if someone wants to. I fumble for a paper in my pocket while Joan leans against the rail and speaks of her lovely daughter. I read Ariel's song from 'The Tempest,' all about five fathom down your father lies.... I. cannot both stand and read, so I sit and watch as Dick and the young men empty the contents of the box into the sea. Trade-offs. I missed it. No, there is something better. A gray stain is spreading through the blue swells. I watch it drift, grow. I glance at the wheelhouse, look back and the gray is almost gone. In a vastness of swelling rolling dissolved minerals, a new dose of minerals is fanning out, now almost gone. Now gone. And I am alive. And, God knows, Monterey Bay is. Impossibly, implausibly, cinematically, as the boat roars back to mechanical life and we began our bounce homeward, two dolphins leap past, fins flying in formation.
Apparently there is a simple antidote to grief, and it is most unattractive, in fact, counterintuitive, and can be accurately summed up as staring into space. Surely there must be more to this, you are thinking. There isn't. I honestly can't describe this as a contemplative process, introspective or revelative. It is just as described. Sitting and staring. To be generous, it could be described as letting things sink in. What the things are, how far they are required to sink, all of this is vague. But the technique seems to be effective.
'Forget getting anything done.' These words from a social worker at Jewish Family Services now ring as profound. Even in retirement, I find it very hard to let go of the notion of achievement. Simply making some dent in something, rolling the Sisyphean rock up or down the slope, something has to happen each day, doesn't it? No, apparently not. I'm beginning to feel this, understand how it is. The system wants a clean slate. It wants a clean wall, wants me to stare at it, wants me to stare at it for a remarkably long period of time. During which, and after which, I feel better. Actually, I feel I have done what had to be done. And in what an Italian colleague from my working days described as America's 'production society,' this is very hard to do. The whole experience might be described as letting go. Achievement. Ambition. All of it has to float away.
Once a certain amount of wall staring has occurred, and I mean sufficient hours, my mental concentration returns. I may actually finish the latest Nick Hornby novel, being into the last 10 pages. I may actually read the notes from the last meeting of the Menlo Park Chorus Steering Committee. More remarkably, it may be possible for me to get through the committee's next meeting. This would be handy, as the event is slated for my living room. Tonight, to be exact.
The whole thing is curious. There is no other word for it, and I am curious, as well. What is going on? What adjustment? What life knowledge needs to be absorbed?
Perhaps the answer is no more complex than death itself. The end. Things, experience, projects, relationships, hopes, joys, they all end. And they end incompletely, sliced off, decapitated, with lots of little pieces left dangling. And at least in Marlou's case, not only do they end messily, but painfully. This is the truth, and the truth is bleak. Surely this is sinking in. And sinking in takes time. And apparently I have to do some sinking myself.
So far, I have only reached one unoriginal conclusion. It's better with company. If you have one person to be close to, maybe the end isn't so bad. As for the messiness and the loose ends, this may present me with an unsolvable problem. Much of my disabled life has involved disappointments and incompleteness, and it has all been hard to accept. But with death staring one in the face, acceptance becomes more urgent. It's enough to make one stare at a wall.
Your memory level is low. This message comes to me from Gateway Computer, a company that is either dead or nearly so, which is entirely appropriate these days. The information is superfluous to a middle-aged person. My memory has been low for years, so I shrug off this reminder, continue my work on screen, making brisk progress. Until the inevitable phone interruption.
"Hi. This is Marty calling on behalf of GE." I pause, waiting to hear if there is more, or if Marty will hurtle on at an imperturbably mechanical pace. There is every chance that she is automated, a robo-call. "Hello?" Nope. She's real. What she doesn't know is that she has given me a defensive opening.
"You work for GE directly, Marty? You are a full-time employee of General Electric?"
No one works for anyone these days. Everyone is subcontracted through multiple layers, each offering fewer employee benefits than the other, part of our national Byzantine race to the bottom.
"I work for a company that represents GE."
"Oh," I say as though profoundly disappointed. Good to get these people off balance before they start hammering you with their sales pitch.
"According to our records, you are the owner of a GE oven." She rattles off a number. "GE has issued a product recall on that particular model.
This doesn't sound like a sales pitch. It also doesn't sound plausible.
"We would like to arrange a time for a service person...."
Ah. Possible home robbery ploy.
"A product recall, Marty?"
"Yes. I wonder if there is a time...."
"I have barely driven it," I tell her. "Besides, it's got air bags."
A silence. Perhaps Marty is automated, only highly so, and this robo call has come off its sprocket.
"Sir, I am calling about GE oven model number...."
"I like the cup holders," I tell her. "It handles well."
Now a longer silence. "Would you like me to call back at another time, sir? Or speak to someone else?"
"No time like the present," I say. Better back off. I don't know what it means that we Americans are so utterly devoid of irony. But surely we are poorly defended against life's cruelest jokes. So much of the human experience involves sudden reversals, things becoming the opposite. A joke with a twist helps me remember this, and even share, or at least spread around, what must be a universal response to life. Except that it isn't universal. Marty doesn't know that I am taking things a step further. I am imagining GE as dead, a former manufacturing company now essentially a bank, its stovetops being stamped out by highly focused and underpaid people in Hunan, while GE Capital tracks Reverse Debenture Derivative Options in Lower Manhattan.
"Well, we can't come right now." Marty attempts a laugh.
"Thursday," I say, hanging up.
The thing about GE being dead, or Gateway Computer being dead for that matter, is the power to communicate across dimensions. I can see why people believe they are being haunted. I understand the power of the undead. It has to do with grief itself. It is grief that does not seem to die, become truly dead.
I will confess that Marlou's yahrzeit held a certain allure, albeit false. Secretly, I believed the one-year mark would have some transformational power. There might be a momentary pain, but the landmark would bring an overall release. The reverse seems to have been true. The unraveling of a death, or perhaps the true absorption of a death, seems to take years and years, perhaps never ending. This may explain the notion of haunting, the dead hanging about unwelcome, making noises upstairs, shifting objects downstairs, moving in when they should be moving out.
My empty flat, if not haunted, has been haunting me. The place is not exactly paying for itself, and it has been a sort of madness to let the apartment remains vacant for so long, rent draining out the door on a monthly basis. So it's time to begin subletting the place, at least on a short-term basis. Which explains why my brother and I were sifting through box after box of files and documents, occasionally shredding, always discarding. With the important exception of the file marked Marriage License. No big surprise, of course, but I had a look. Damned if there wasn't something about the date. It was this date, today, 30 April 2004. Which also happened to coincide with tonight's 30 April performance date of the Menlo Park Chorus, the annual spring concert being dedicated to the memory of Marlou. Everything synchronous, in sync, lined up like planets in some fateful astrological chart.
My response to such discoveries can be angry. I don't want to go there, as we say in California. I keep thinking this will be over. It should be over, should it not? And now it's cleanup time. Cleaning out, turning over, turn, turn. There is a season, but this season is endless. A time to sit at the dining room table, looking through one box after the next. Here are Marlou's property insurance documents from a condominium she sold 20 years ago. Here are Marlou's notes from a conference she attended long before me. A trip to Japan, also long pre-Paul. Everyone of these tokens fills with the sadness of life. I fill with the sadness of my own life. Recalling my own loneliness, I think I see the same thing in Marlou and her youthful, and not so youthful, solitary travels. The only thing that is reliably and certainly sad about all this is the brevity. Marlou was interrupted mid-life, mid-travels.
An employee badge from The Children's Health Council, Palo Alto. Marlou certainly photographed well, looking lovely and quite spontaneous when it came time for Human Resources to snap her photo. She did not fit into many, probably most, work environments. But somehow this place was right for her. It takes so long to find our place in the world, and this seems enormously sad too. Another box. She was practically a one woman document repository. State of California credit union statements stretch on and on, like the back story to Beowulf. Why would anyone want to know how much they saved in 1982? The shredder turns the present into light, fluffy strands of past, chopped and ready for burning or composting or stuffing into pillows.
Marlou's file of research into some of the flowers at Filoli gardens in nearby Woodside. She actually did enough work to create a particular flower tour of...was it chrysanthemums...rhododendrons? I don't know, having already tossed the file. No one wants this stuff anymore. This is the sad truth, hard for me to accept. But the only other alternative is to endlessly muse upon the contents of these boxes, appreciating things the way Marlou did, or trying to. Which is impossible. It has been a year. The apartment needs to be rented. Stuff has to move.
Music. Marlou had a box of sheet music. Most are choral scores, some piano. Maybe someone in the Menlo Park Chorus wants to have a look. Somewhat reluctantly, I leave the music sitting in a box on the back of the sofa. And there is more. A bag of coins. Change left over from some trip. A few British coins, and God knows what the rest are. Many, I suspect, are no longer legal tender in the Euro Zone. The maddening thing is that I now have three or four such bags around. Marlou and I shared this odd habit, dumping coins left over from a trip into a plastic bag. Which would be fine if one remembered the coin bag before the next departure. But it hasn't worked that way. And with all these coin bags around, people will suspect me of raiding airport vending machines from London to Madrid. I didn't do it, honest.
Strangely, Debbie my sister-in-law stumbles upon a fine use for Marlou's art supplies. My cousin's daughter in Oakland wants them, and wants them badly. One box of colored art pencils costs $175, it turns out. And this particular brand is just perfect for obscure aspects of her metal work, Beth tells me. More astonishing, Marlou's box of fabric scraps, stuff she used in making collages, bits of material that somehow stimulated her imagination...well, Beth wants this too. Giving Marlou's creative side a new life in a new generation, raw stuff that someone can finish into something. Particularly heartening to see the beat go on.
Enormous files of genealogical material. This was Marlou's metaphorical search. Getting to the heart of the family secret. One of her last acts was to dictate some genealogical work in progress to our friend Arnie. I recently discarded his notes. This was work that Marlou could not finish. No one could finish. It has finished itself.
And something about the scattering of Marlou's ashes over Monterey Bay may finish me, it seems. I am surprised at my own reaction. But it is what it is. Angrily, I focus on the physical details. How heavy the ashes are, how sharp and fragmented, how impossible to scatter. In reality, they will be dumped. Poured over the side of a little boat chugging off the coast of Moss Landing. Dumped. An entire life, all the interests, obsessions, follies. Incinerated. Then shredded. This is just a rehearsal for my own end. A chance to see the dissolution, to get angry with it, to get sad with it, to get on with it.
