Window

Where does it come from, this gray hair?  The stuff is falling in bunches of white-ish Bermuda grass, here and there sprinkled with the occasional charcoal strand as a sort of teaser.  It's like the morning homeless shift that quietly sweeps through downtown Menlo Park around about 7 AM.  Where do these guys come from?  Meaning, where do they spend the night?  They must have lodging, at least during the winter.  I hope they have some room in some shelter, and there must be a way to ask, if one is serious and invests a certain amount of time.  I would not like someone trailing me, poised to pop the question 'where do you live?'  Ironically, I once confessed to trusted friends that I felt self-conscious about renting an apartment, home ownership being such a symbol of success, permanence, maybe even adulthood.

So it is foreign, my gray hair, only falling from my head, past my eyes and into the realm of attention every seven weeks or so when Danielle comes to my home to cut it.  Like our street people, where does it go at night?  Thing about the morning homeless guys on Live Oak Ave. is that they seem so purposeful.  They have a job.  They are out scrounging around rubbish containers in search of aluminum cans.  One of them pushes a shopping cart, head up, giving an expansive and friendly wave to passersby.  In terms of attitude, he could do well at Home Depot.  Surely he knows as much about what he's doing as anyone at the big-box hardware store.  Ask most guys at Home Depot about the merits of various fluorescent bulbs, and they will grow dim.  But this itinerant man rattling a shopping cart down the road, breezily hailing the neighbors and quickly passing on, well he's a model of service attitude and efficiency.  His colleague, who appears a few minutes later, has more of the hangdog about him.  He leans into his shopping cart as though pushing a load of coal up a 19th-century mine, his head below the handle, grim and determined, his face invisible.  Neither man worries about gray hair.

I am worried about being aimless.  This gets to me now and then, although the issue becomes obscured and forgotten, like the graying-whitening of my hair.  In fact, it is the small insertion of Danielle entering my home with her scissors and clippers that has thrown my routine all to hell.  Otherwise, I would face the big problem of the day: blog or book, which to write?  Being aimless, of course, the answer has aimed itself, aiming me at my desk with nothing much in mind.  Trying as I am to blot out the mind.

Danielle must have been making idle reference to the tree outside my kitchen window, a view I actually avoid, unless it's night and one can see into the apartment of my French neighbors who live over the fence and therefore in another world.  Am I certain of their nationality?  Hardly.  But the occasional phone conversation wafts over on warm nights.  And someone was speaking French at some point in my recent history, a vague span of time, so indeterminate to have allowed for considerable turnover in the apartment over the fence.  Many a tenant could have come and gone since the French one or ones.  In retirement, everything has contracted, time grown vague.

In any case, Danielle pointed out that the tree was perfect for observing bird's nests.  Were there any?  Clip, clip, she went, awaiting my answer.  I wasn't avoiding her or sidestepping the issue of birds...and where they go at night.  Something Danielle had written, a short account of watching a nest of birds, their spring egg laying, incubating, hatching and launching, this little history was on my mind.  It came with a photo, just a page or two, as I recall.  Watching from the window of her Palo Alto retirement home, something about this vignette of nature had caught Danielle's eye, and she had produced an account.  And not in her native French, of course, but in English, edited with the help of a friend.  And now something strange is happening.  Danielle continues to clip and cut, hair tumbles, a French woman with scissors here, one imagined or remembered, impossible to say, in the window beyond mine, the birds' story on a piece of paper, and how much the story impressed Marlou.  She has a dignity about her, a quiet courage, Marlou said of Danielle.  And now Danielle would say that of Marlou.  And on this aimless morning, what aims at me but a lamp?

I dreamed I was a lamp, Marlou told me.  She spoke in a moment I have described before.  An incident I must keep rehashing.  Her eyes were wide and so was her countenance.  She spoke quietly, strength doubtless being limited at that point, a week or two before her death.  The latter clear only in retrospect, of course.  The mystery of human descent, of moving from the animate to the cold and still, and of pain, that was all one could know at the moment.  I dreamed I was a lamp, she said, and my destiny was to shine through you.

With so much flooding in at such a moment, what I could absorb just then had more to do with her vulnerability, openness and clarity.  Marlou guarded herself, held her private thoughts so closely, that knowing her could be difficult.  But we were past that now, this being the deathbed, almost the last chance and soon the last look.  A poem by Billy Collins sent to me this morning by Jane, its title something about lightning at a picnic, but really about death and how its evocation brings us to life...that may have helped bring me to this strange chain of memory, from falling hair to window to birds to Marlou.

This recollection is one of the most painful I carry.  What's sad seems to have to do with the human unfulfilled.  And I can trace that backwards to my mother and a child's preternatural sense of people and their plight.  But it seems to me that just as the weight of death is too much with me, so is the weight of love.  For Marlou was revealing something about the illuminating power of human connection.  Which is way beyond us, far from anyone's control or intention.  But a small miracle that can happen.  And with sufficient courage and trust, it is a miracle that can be shared.  Not just with a dying person.  But with any of the seemingly not dying persons around me.  We shine through each other, help each other shine.  And the shining becomes particularly intense when it becomes conscious.

Hard to say about aimless days.  You become the target, of course.  Even of the past.  The seeming past.  Maybe you become time's lantern.  And what is there to do but follow Diogenes out the door and up the street for lunch, maybe even coffee.  Not that I am questing for an honest man.  I am finding an honest man in myself.  And they're very confusing, Marlou's words about the lantern, where the light shines from, who it shines on.  And who or what illuminates.