Survival

It was over soon enough, but the day wasn't, which meant too many more hours of daylight and of consciousness.  I scared myself, that's what I did.  And, no, even after years of psychological instruction, I do not understand such things.  I may be slightly better at surviving them.  Perhaps there's that.  Not much else.

I would not say that Jane and I had an idyllic weekend...unless one is sufficiently grounded to sense what an idyll meant to a guy like Tennyson.  As opposed to some producer at DreamWorks.  We had a pastoral journey.  That is to say, we had some discomfort moving across the landscape.  But finally alighted in a natural spot of great beauty, safely and pleasantly.  The difficult part is key.  We had, or I had, a misunderstanding or two still rattling about my brain.  Keeping me awake, in fact.  And which I feared we might never address.  And yet we did, early our first morning at the Motel Inverness.  Something had been bugging me in the night.  And with the night barely behind us, we had our talk.  Naturally with tea, its brewing and ingestion, pervading the hour.  Or was it hours?  Whatever.  One of us is a Brit, one an apprentice Brit.  So tea had to be part of it.

The day did not look promising.  It barely looked like a day.  What does it mean that in a changing planet, summer has piled itself atop summer to scorch Moscow and other parts, while summer quietly slips out of town here in Northern California?  The coldest August on record, scream the local newspaper headlines.  We were not arguing, Jane and I.  

Well, we were.  But not about the weather.  But arguing is good.  Brooding is good.  Whatever it takes to face what needs to be faced.  Which we did, quite thoroughly, and satisfactorily.  So with the morning still young, the sky was still brooding, but I no longer was.  In fact, I was feeling very good about my connection with Jane.  And marveling, while trying not to feel too guilty, about this turn of fortune.  Jane reminded me that in many cultures fortune is conceived as a wheel.  With everything turning, ups and downs are temporary.  So, go ahead, be exhilarated at one moment, crushed at the next.  Just remember.  To everything, turn, turn.  There is a season.  And this one, ours, is a good one.

Leaving us to the rest of the day.  Which no sensible person would spend in the Motel Inverness.  Not when there is breakfast to be had at the Pine Cone diner, Point Reyes.  Not only breakfast, but lunch.  The hour being what it was when we finally rolled in.  Sorry, but I can't resist the oyster sandwich.  Or the fresh oysters down the street.  Or the oyster stew across from the fresh oysters down the street.  There being only four real restaurants in all of Point Reyes.  Yes, doubtless the fourth has some oyster thing happening on its menu too.  That's why God invented adjacent Tomales Bay.  To grow oysters.  Afterwards, having grown sluggish, what was there to do but drive out toward the fabled Point Reyes lighthouse?  Or one of the beaches along Drake's Bay?

A splendid idea, but not looking so splendid when one looked at the sky.  The coldest August on record in the Tomales Bay region looks grey.  And there's nothing wrong with gray.  Except that blue looks better.  So we drove along the bay, the symmetrically long and even body of water that is actually a rift valley and quietly conducts the San Andreas Fault out to sea.  After which, I don't really know....  Are there underwater earthquakes?  Or is the fault just too bored to act up?  Must look into this.

Wherever the fault was headed, we were headed back into the fog.  It hung dark and heavy over the mountains and plains of Point Reyes National Seashore.  So we turned around.  We returned to, of all things, Motel Inverness.  Which had much to do with Jane.  'It's lovely,' she had said of the view from our terrace.  It's not the sort of scene that excites everyone.  But after a year or so together, we know this much about each other.  It excites us.  

There's something very satisfying about the green shallows of a disappearing bay, or beginning estuary, or incipient marshland.  One fumbles about for nouns just as nature fumbles about for footing.  Are we splashing or walking as our minds travel across the luminous blue channels and green islands that constitute this end of Tomales Bay?  One of us, the one with fully enervated legs, did actually hike out to the end of the boardwalk which leads from the motel to the bird blind in the distance.  I envied Jane.  But not enough to take my crutch and fight my way out there myself.  I'm sure she saw more than I did.  But perhaps not.  I was the one who noticed the quail family interactions.  The big fat one perched on the railing outside the motel's lobby was standing guard.  From my vantage point, four toddler quail happily bobbed for food in the motel lawn.  Stirring to see the primal mother instinct at work, surely hardwired into the animal brain, more than training and example could pass from one generation to the next.

'Yes.  When mother is sick, life is very difficult.'  This signaled that our hour was up, the first of...well, there must have been hundreds.  London, 1969.  A woman analyst.  A German Jewish refugee...and I could almost add 'of course,' except that would be someone else's idea of a cliché.  For me it was family, more or less.  And the beginning of years of intense inner and emotional reordering.  Which began with the perspicacity evident in those very words.  I had not talked about my mother in that, our first session.  I was far too reticent, self-protecting and psychologically inexperienced to delve much.  I don't recall mentioning my mother at all.

And now, more than four decades later and so far from the real Inverness that the copy seems more real than the original...I am the one who sizes up the picture, regarding the mother quail and the babies.  It is something learned, relearned and unlearned.  And when the weekend is over and I'm home alone...albeit briefly...the other part of the mother experience comes bursting out of the ether.  Panic, anger, physical sensations such as losing balance.  Which is the other side of the reconnecting-with-a-woman experience.  By now somewhat heightened by that other experience, a wife who dies in one's arms.  Which in turn must resonate with that earlier whiff of death, the unmothering mother.

And so one stumbles into a new relationship.  Grateful that one can stumble at all.  Mindful that stumbling is inherently dangerous and should not be attempted alone.  Mindfulness being all one has in the most extreme and solitary moments of danger.  Which come as though summoned.

Motel Inverness, the resident manager explains, has something of a checkered history.  For a while, the operation fell into the hands of an enormously entertaining huckster, a felon on the lam.  He had swindled a person or two in his day, and continued on this course in Inverness...where he somehow got the job of motel manager.  He drained the place of funds, while covering his tracks with certain cosmetic improvements.  When the law got too close, he hit the road.  Leaving behind an ambiguous legacy.  Yes, he was a con artist.  And yet he did start a certain pattern of improvement that led to the current motel amenities.  The terraces that face the marsh.  A large deck and cheery...although ludicrously large and appointed...front office and lobby.  Skylights, custom glass, beams and costly woodwork.  Keep in mind that the Motel Inverness has all of five rooms.  

And the upshot?  The people of Inverness still recall him fondly.  Some are rumored to even keep in touch with him, this quintessential American.  Crook, self promoter, ripoff artist, whatever he is, he now lives somewhere abroad.  Canada.  Central America.  No one seems to agree on this point.  One thing is clear, that some in Inverness still love him, and Jane and I both found the story quite amusing.  Which is either the result, or part of the cause, of loving each other.

More than four decades ago, about one year before I had my first session with the London analyst, my mother hustled out of my hospital room.  Once she was safely down the corridor, my highly acute hearing clicked on.  Even with the door shut, I could make out the nurses' voices in the hallway.  'Well,' one muttered, 'I knew Paul had problems.  And we just met the reason why.'

They missed the other part.  That my mother was a toughie.  Not an attractive quality, but essential if one is going to survive.  The latter became my stock in trade.  I inherited the genes from her.  Part of the package.  Part of the mother.