Yesterday morning I found a large pot of yellow flowers and a CD of Mozart piano sonatas on my front porch with a note from Ragan wishing me a happy Easter. The first thing I felt was relief, that he hadn’t left me a long letter of the heart. The second thing I felt was criticism of my heart, which has cooled so quickly. He really is a gentleman in both senses of that word and I can find no fault in him, other than that we are incompatible.
Another shock to the town: Jay Pace, longtime owner/editor of our local newspaper, has died of a cerebral hemorrhage! Like Nina, he lived a crowded, intense life. Like Nina, he was only in his fifties. Like Nina, he was a pillar of the community.
Death energizes the community, brings us together like survivors in a plot we will one day be written out of. At Jay’s funeral reception yesterday, it took almost two hours to get from the back of the line to the front. Everyone in town was there—the police chief, the mailman, and hundreds of others, including several Episcopal bishops. The room rang with a kind of exhilaration that may be partly the relief of being passed over. But I think it was also the delight of being together and paying tribute to Jay.
A funeral in a small town is intense. The one for Jay at Saint James the Less was jam-packed, not a space available that wasn’t filled. I took the last chair in the balcony. Jay’s singing group gave us “Peace Like a River” and “On the Banks of the Jordan,” which they had vowed to sing for each other at their funerals. Ira Andrews’s rich voice, like warm delta mud, ran beneath the others. Chris Pace’s eulogy to his father was full of jokes about his graduating in five years from college, his love of sports, and his hatred of players who didn’t stick with the team that brought them. The sound of five hundred people laughing is a beautiful sound. But it was Steve Pace, the smaller and quieter younger brother, who brought the church to tears. At the end of his eulogy he asked the congregation to help him do something. “Close your eyes and think of Jay as you want to remember him”—I thought of him at the variety show at the piano—and then Steve sang, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Jay’s favorite song.
It was such a loving, courageous act, by a deeply introverted man whose voice was not large but true. Toward the end, the congregation gently hummed along with him, unable to resist. This morning upon waking it did not seem possible that Jay was not waking up, too.
The town is going to stumble around for a while without him. I resolved to be a better person.
Must note that I saw Ragan yesterday morning on my walk. It was the annual Railroad Run, and he was standing behind the Hanover Arts and Activities building. He looked so handsome, his eyes were steady and loving, and when we parted he kissed me on the cheek. All day it stayed with me—a longing to be in the presence of such affection—and I wished I had not exposed myself to it. But a month has gone by and perhaps from his perspective it is time to meet normally as friends.
Seeing Ragan has unsettled me, physically and emotionally. This is not his fault. Even so, I noticed that his nose was running a little. These kinds of critiques would only get worse if we were together. But right now I am missing what was wonderful about him and forgetting what was not.
Spring has arrived in full force. The tree we planted at Mom’s memorial service is full of little leaf buds. The grass is juicy and shining. The dogwood outside my bedroom window is a floating white spray of flowers. I want to be outside to let the sun nourish my poor winter skin.
When I think about who around me holds me up, gives me meaning the way a mother can, it surprises me to realize that there is no one. Yet I move through the day without feeling any particular disorientation. The absence of landfall does not make me lose my bearings. I wonder whether I am truly detached and at peace, or if it is a loss of feeling.
A note from Ragan, asking for a chance to reexamine our relationship. I answered with a note saying that I am not yet over it and cannot risk being emotionally derailed.
A solitary weekend, spent mostly in the garden. Physical and imaginative work go together. But the creative urge can be sabotaged by smaller urges to eat, sleep, or create something on a lower level, getting the easy reward of a shiny counter or a row of dinner napkins drying on a clothesline.
This morning I went bird-watching with my friend Gerry, who came over with an extra pair of binoculars for me. I was amazed at his ability to separate one birdsong from another and to identify them so easily as they flew by. I came across what may have been a woodpecker half hidden by leaves. He had a white crown, streaked with red and black, a snowy breast, and gray feathers. Then, when I took my eyes from the binoculars, he disappeared, like a glimpse of truth that had slipped away.
I worked all day transcribing the last of Mom’s letters. Then I began to slip mine between them. I found a letter from Dad written in 1980, recounting his whole recent life with his girlfriend and how badly it had ended, and how much he wanted to rebuild the family. The letters are allowing me, in a collected state, to experience what I wasn’t open to or able to experience fully at the time.
Around two-thirty I got up for a break from the tidal wave of paper records—some of it quite powerful—but the simplicity of my original idea, to write a book about Mom, has been blurred by all the other people in my life, particularly the men who wanted in or out of it. Suddenly it’s about me. The notebook binders, divided by years, are becoming loaded down with data that only tell me one important thing—that life goes at a heartbreaking breakneck speed, even as we sit quietly in a chair and chafe at our inactivity.
I rode my bicycle over to [sculptor] Jerry Peart’s house to sit behind his barn and talk about art. We both agreed that the only thing worse than reporting to oneself would be reporting to someone else, although he wishes that someone would tell him what to do. “I am capable of doing whatever I want,” he said, “but getting the vision of what I want is what’s difficult.”
Today I threw three huge plastic bags of old letters in the trash. They are the last of my harvest, an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have tossed out all fan letters, saved all letters to and from my children, and reserved the letters written by or sent to my ex-husband and documents pertaining to the divorce, unsure as to how or whether they can be useful in a larger sense. In addition, I’ve tried to hang on to certain letters that shed an unflattering but truthful light upon me. I am, I believe, finally able to look at myself dispassionately.
Reading old letters from friends who have drifted away brings them right back to me, fresh and ready to relate to again. I am tempted to pick up the phone and renew the relationship, like a library book.
As my capacity to retain information shrinks, it is reassuring to be able to know, because of what I have saved, when things of importance happened. A plasticized holy card from the funeral of Christian’s son Matthew tells me that he died on May 15, 1994—ten years ago. What a day of sorrow that was! A letter from Jay Pace, dead less than six weeks, thanks me for Wilfred Sheed’s essay on suffering and tells me about his own spiritual practice, which includes reading a page a day from Julian of Norwich. My letters are a paper empire, a documented version of what swims in my head, minus the terrible pain that often accompanied my life at the time.
If we look upon our experiences as assets, we must manage to preserve or transfer those assets to other people before we die or they dissolve in the grave with us.
Last night I hopped on my bike and rode down to Cross Brothers for a “wonder chicken” for my supper. The soft spring air was filled with the scent of grass clippings, moist earth, and flowering shrubs all mixed together. Riding down the street, I moved through bands of perfume.
On a whim I decided to stop by Dolo Kerr’s on Center Street, and the two of us sat on her front porch and swapped news, gossip, and ideas. There is something so open-minded and easy about Dolo. She had heard I was in love. Her daughter told her that Ragan was a catch. I laughed. “He is, but I’m not.” Dolo’s face is like W. H. Auden’s, a series of dried riverbeds with two bright blue pools for eyes
that organize the whole.
Recently, when talking to my friend Nikki about face lifts, I implored her to resist. Looking at a friend who has had a face lift is like reading a book with half the pages ripped out.
Yesterday I helped Ellen harvest her field full of peonies. While filling buckets full of flowers, her teenage daughter Laura came to join us. “I’m lonely,” she said. There is an endlessness to young loneliness. You feel the emptiness of your life, so unfurnished, so bare of anything but dreams that may not come to pass. As we picked peonies side by side, I felt this sadness and tried to remember the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that addressed it:
Margaret are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving…
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Dinner last night with the new rector of a church in Ashland. How perverse is the heart. He mentioned his favorite book, The Leopard, which is also mine, and his favorite Mozart piano concerto, No. 27 (mine as well), and was, in many ways, what Ragan isn’t. But there was no chemistry, just a pleasant evening with a pleasant man.
Lunch in New York with a radiant ninety-two-year-old Margot Wilkie, who personifies what Freya Stark wrote about getting old.
On the whole, age comes most gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world—art, or philosophy, or learning—regions where the years are scarcely noticed and young and old can meet in a pale, truthful light.
I told her how well she looked. “Lots of makeup,” she said, deflecting the praise.
Her Buddhist rinpoche and one of his students were upstairs in her apartment when she met me in the lobby. We spent most of our time talking about what we’ve learned in life. Margot recounted a long-ago evening with friends when her mother was still alive, discussing what love was without coming to a conclusion. The next morning she asked her mother how she would define it. “Love is understanding,” she said. So, in this way, I think I do love Ragan, or at least my understanding of him creates the love I have.
The next day I had lunch with Gene Young. I found myself waxing eloquent on the subject of a friend’s worth, hers in particular. I advanced the metaphor of a friend being like the net around a bag of onions that keeps the onions from rolling off the table.
A lost friend was returned this week. After years of estrangement, brought on by my thoughtless, hurtful response to her sister’s death, Mary returned, as if nothing had ever gone wrong, her warm voice flowing into the phone. Her other sister, Nancy, must have held my place in the book. When a friend returns, an empire is restored.
New York in May is about as perfect a place to be as can be imagined. The leaves are squeaky clean and green, the air soft. Every street and face seems out of my reach: the gay homeboys in their pale pink shirts and caps, sweet-faced and doomed, the quivering intelligence of Swoosie Kurtz on stage, the joy of sitting in a room and listening to Justin read his lines for an upcoming audition. My heart begins to ache with the desire to live here and the knowledge that I can’t.
IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
Walking back from Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue this morning I stopped to look at a tree spangled with dew—each purple leaf covered with bright balls of light still holding their own against the sun, which will eventually burn them up. I did not work hard enough to find the precise words that would pick out the image on a page. Poets do that; they make us think they strolled past the tree and effortlessly found the words to describe it.
An honest but empty day’s work yesterday, trying to find a thread I could follow to begin my mother’s book. But I am too close to the material I have amassed to see it, and my poor mother is drowned by other people’s voices. The term “pilgrim soul,” from a Yeats poem, popped out at me as a good description of her. There was something so steadfast about her.
Artistically, I don’t find my own life compelling material—all those boyfriends, all that angst. It seems like the same script over and over again. Yet if there was a way to get beneath the surface and redeem it, make it stand for something more, I would. Perhaps I am too blind or proud to use what is there.
Last night, my young friend Mary Boodell gave me a free ticket to the Richmond Symphony, where she is the first flutist. She is pregnant and as she sat on the stage with her flute, the crashing sounds of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony swirled around her. I thought of her unborn baby curled like a small dinner roll in her womb, listening the way one might listen from beneath the water in a swimming pool. What an introduction to the world, to be growing in the middle of music, soothed and stimulated by it.
The French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal died at thirty-nine, a fully realized, deeply accomplished person. Today we mature so much more slowly. We are too time-driven, distracted, and diverted by trivia to pay attention to our growth. One of the aspects of Mom’s life that I found so endearing was her inability to know what to do with herself. She spent a good deal of time wondering, as she phrased it, how to put in my day. I think that knowing how to put in your day is one of the great unspoken problems of being alive.
On May 30, Ragan came back into my life. The only person more surprised than I was Ragan, but when he stood outside my front door my heart melted. At dinner, he said he felt like a condemned felon. I pushed everything on the table away to hold his hands, and when he held mine I realized how much I had missed them—and him. Being as honest as I can, I have missed being loved by him, but, equally important, I have missed loving him. What this does to my reservations about our intellectual compatibility I don’t know. But if we go slowly perhaps we will find out together. As Ragan wrote, “We’re close,” and that did not change even when apart. I care about what happens to him, more deeply than I knew. And once again I am on the verge of leaving for Italy. But knowing he is waiting for me to return is a reassuring bookend at the end of the trip.
IN ITALY AT VILLA SPANNOCCHIA WITH MY FRIEND VALERIE, WHO DECIDED TO COME ALONG FOR THE EXPERIENCE
A sleepless night. I wake up to a full moon in the window. The earth is fragrant with damp earth and cool summer air. Valerie wakes up, too, and we talk for an hour or more about our mothers. She also misses her mother, and she wept a little when she talked about her. All through the night an insistent bird just outside our window makes a one-note call every other second. It doesn’t stop until close to dawn.
There is such a feeling of home here. Last night after dinner, I sat on a stone bench in front of the villa porch, looked into the star-filled sky and listened to the chatter of animals in the woods. It brought me great peace. I miss Ragan. The delight I feel is the delight of feeling a solid love replacing the quixotic one.
Venice! We came on a bright cool day with Pachelbel playing in the Opera House. It is difficult to say whether light or darkness becomes Venice more. Night or day, it is the most brilliantly beautiful place I have ever seen. But beauty costs! A glass of tonic water (no gin) costs $15 in the Piazza San Marco. A dinner in a small al fresco restaurant, $38; a half-hour gondola ride down the Rialto, $35. There is an absence of clatter and noise in Venice, as if all sound is absorbed by the thick stones of the houses, the water in the canals. Last night, coming back to our hotel, Valerie saw a rat scurry past the hotel’s front door. Venice strikes me as a town full of rats, barely hidden from the tourists’ view. Florence charmed me all over again. A few hours by myself, walking, walking, my legs so strong from all the steps and hills I’ve climbed on this visit. A chorus of Italian men were singing “Blue Moon” on the loggia of the Uffizi, a Dante performance artist in gold body paint nearby.
I was surprised at how Assisi did not charm me. The punishing steepness of the streets, the lack of trees, and the dry bleached appearance of the houses had no appeal. The men of Assisi all reminded me of the paintings of Saint Francis. They are small and wiry with intense, thin faces, their hair cut stubble short, like tonsures. The people of Assisi are gentle, kindly people, as if the peacefulness of the saint had sunk into their co
llective unconscious. But Assisi itself, with that huge, money-making, tourist-attracting basilica dwarfing the rest of the town, left me cold.
Home. I arrive to find a basket of flowers hanging from my front door with a loving note from Ragan. He is always surprising me. I will never get used to it. I love the way he wants to take care of things, how he coils my hose, fixes my lawnmower, paves my way. These are not small considerations at any age, much less mine. Eliza said she wanted to cry when she heard I was back with Ragan. Justin said, “You’ve come to your senses.”
Can this be love, this quiet, accepting affection I feel, coupled with a deepening concern and desire to be with this man? What a great undeserved gift to be loved in this way. Some kind of a sea change is occurring in me.
Ragan’s two daughters are a real balm for Ragan. They are loving and intelligent women. Playing croquet on his lawn with the three grandsons, and Bear weaving an ecstatic circle around us all, was a wonderful gift.
As his confidence in my affection for him grows, Ragan becomes more himself. He wrote an epic poem, consisting of two words, my and darling. He laughed when I asked him to recite the “ninth stanza” again.
Rereading Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman reminds me of the way we shape our lives like a story, how unconsciously we attract plots, outcomes, and other characters who undermine or complicate our unfolding drama. We supply the meaning and therein lies the difference between one life and another.
A Monday of good intentions: exercise, diet, put money in the bank, redirect my boat toward a deeper part of the sea. There is a temptation to drift from the center of my life, to seek security in another relationship. I feel it with Ragan, with whom I am falling more deeply in love. Suddenly I want guarantees, outward signs, public pledges—i.e., marriage—and whereas once I worried that he’d ask me, now I worry that he won’t. In my defense I think it is natural to desire permanence when it comes to love. At this time in my life it seems more meaningful to be married, particularly when there are children and grandchildren involved. I do love this man. He does what he promises. You can set your watch by him. I am not used to this.
The Journal Keeper Page 18
