Last night before he went home he said he was so happy with everything in his life that he was frightened. Fear is the unwanted companion at the picnic. I have longed for the kind of intimacy I have with Ragan all my life, and the sweetness of having it in late middle age—or early old age—is so much greater for having done without it until now.
Last night, Ragan and I decided on the spur of the moment to drive to the ocean. It was a lovely time, filled with easy silences and unself-conscious revelations. “Here is what you must do to make this relationship work,” I said. Before I could supply him with the requirement, he said, “Love and adore you forever?” “Yes,” I replied. “And you,” he countered, “must accept me for who I am.” “I do,” I said.
Yesterday morning I picked a bunch of Queen Anne’s lace from the roadside. What a miracle of design it is: delicate explosions of flowerets, some at full bloom, others still curled tightly inside spiky green strands that fall backward, like the popped ribs of an umbrella in a windstorm, when the flower is unfurled.
For you, as for everyone, there is only one road that can lead to God and this is the fidelity to remain constantly true to yourself, to what you feel is highest in you. Do not worry about the rest. The road will open before you as you go.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
Letters to Two Friends, 1926–1952
This morning I am picking words like fruit from other people’s trees. I am grateful that there exists the capacity to dine off ideas. This great word swap keeps me from being impoverished by too few thoughts of my own to sustain me.
Reading from Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (to show a writing student where he is pulling his punches), I was struck by a thought I need—that big prayers are required for big results. I have neglected to act upon this fact. To humbly, confidently lay out all my requests, to pray about and for them, has a power that I have been neglecting to use.
Ragan back from a Florida business trip. This morning he sleeps happily upstairs while Bear and I are downstairs in the living room. Such domesticity! A quiet evening reading Orwell’s essays (me) and the newspaper (Ragan), then to bed and going to sleep in loving arms. I wonder how many embraces it will take to equal the number of embraces denied. Already I am healed, unaware until now that I was wounded.
Last night, after putting supper on the table, I was smitten by the beauty of the scene: the white plates and napkins on a checkered red cotton tablecloth, the flowers in their small glass bottles, the smell of onions and rosemary-rubbed chicken, steam rising from the corn in the late-afternoon light.
Ragan on the subject of humility: “It reminds you that you don’t have all the answers and that it is all right not to—nobody does. Actually, it’s a relief.”
I hadn’t thought of humility this way. I’ve always lived as if finding (and holding on to) the answers was the point of life. But it suddenly struck me that true enlightenment consists in being empty, not full, of answers, that people who are full of answers must drag them around all day like an over-packed suitcase, with no room for anything new.
A decision yesterday—to give up hard liquor. I have been waiting for that late-afternoon gin and tonic with too much eagerness. The impetus was my concern that the effects of alcohol upon my brain were too deleterious to risk it any longer. I poured an almost full bottle of Tanqueray down the kitchen sink.
IN CALIFORNIA WITH RAGAN
No journal entries for over a week. Love has swept me off the page. The reflective life is apparently no match for the life I am leading now. Yesterday, sitting on the deck outside of Sam’s Anchor Café in Tiburon, watching seagulls wheel above the tables in search of food, I couldn’t believe our good fortune—all of San Francisco, gleaming like a sugar palace on the bay, the sailboats keeling over with wind, the sunny water and skies; there is no more beautiful sight. Molly Keil’s house, with every window full of boats, the elegance of the old Keil house flanked by tulip poplars, eucalyptus, and palms, was both dreamlike and real.
IN CARMEL
Alone in Francesca’s kitchen, a mat of fog over the town. Yesterday, Francesca, Shary Farr, and I took a picnic to Garland Park in Carmel Valley. We reclined by the river and had lunch (how many friendships are cemented by the same taste in food?) and I read aloud Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks” from Ten Poems to Set You Free. They were as quiet as children during story time, with the water softly purling over the river stones nearby. Then I took a walk and sat down on a bench and watched the birch trees.
The leaves caught the sun and tossed it with the wind, a million cradles rocking a million slips of sun back and forth, trees on fire with silver-green light. The dusty summer air smelled of all the boring years when I dreamed of action. It is an earthy, sweet smell, that travels directly to that part of my brain where whole years of my childhood wait to be remembered: summer nights, oak trees, wool blankets, screen porches, burnt toast, the scent of my own arm as I rested my chin upon it and stared into the distance.
For what seems like the first time in my life, I have begun to see, really see, birds. It was a blazingly blue-and-white day, with sandpipers making quilted tracks across the wet sand. A pair of egrets flew so low that a wave caught their wings before they sheared off in perfect formation. At Stewart’s Beach I watched the pelicans wheel around the sky, sometimes folding their wings to lower their altitude, then resting on the currents to glide gracefully to the earth. Seagulls have a different method of flying. They land like parasailors in one swift downward motion until their feet touch the sand. The sky is a parallel universe, full of activity I had been too earthbound to notice. Before now, I was like the man on the beach slowly sweeping his metal detector over the sand, my eye and mind taken up with lower things. Near him, a group of four people sit in beach chairs facing the sea, each one of them buried in a book. This seems a bit like coming to a symphony only to wind up talking on the phone.
Francesca and I stayed up late into the night, clearing the air of her grievances about me. They were all about neatness: stains on sweaters, coffee grounds on the floor and in the kitchen drawers, being too proprietary about a house that isn’t mine. I spoke to Ragan about my sloppiness this morning on the phone and he said he knew this about me but considered it part of the package. But what is frustrating to me is to realize that my notion of real, steady improvement in this department is so far from the requirements of most people. Truly, I don’t care about getting a hole in my tights as long as the ratio between holes and tights isn’t too equal. Holes happen. In the end, Francesca and I repledged ourselves to each other. Our mutual affection is not in doubt, which makes these talks easier.
Dinner with my friend Julie Beck, who seems much less encumbered. Her house in Corral de Tierra sits on a hill over-looking the bare California hills. Below, the oaks twist in the light, each tree a separate expression against wheat-colored summer grass. She has created a perfect pause of a house, each room pressed into silence by the view. It is cool and dry and brilliant, rather like Julie herself.
BACK HOME AGAIN
Yesterday, I read to the Immaculates from Jacques Lusseyran’s essays on blindness. What a touching group they are. The highlight was Nancy’s statement that she was actually grateful for her blindness. “I wouldn’t exchange the gifts I’ve received for seeing,” she declared. All over town, these quiet, sanctifying processes are going on, right beneath my eyes.
A conversation with Justin, who said he loved Ragan. “Is that because you don’t have to worry about me?” I asked. “Not at all,” he said. “I love him because he brings you joy.”
Sunday night, after dinner with Ragan’s grandchildren, Bennett and Lucas backed me into the kitchen and Lucas asked, “Do you like Pops?” “Yes,” I said. “Do you like him enough to marry him?” asked Bennett. (They were grinning from ear to ear.) “What?” I exclaimed, feigning shock and surprise. This made them laugh delightedly. “Pops said you would blush,” said Lucas. “Did he put you up to this?”
I asked. They didn’t answer but Lucas pointed a finger at me and said with mock sternness, “Saint James the Less Church, eight o’clock tomorrow. Be there!”
It was another warm family night with the three grandsons in front of the fire. Bennett, plump and cuddly, fit easily by my side on the sofa. Lucas, always thoughtful, looked into the fire and said, “I’m having a good time.” Matthew, the bookworm, was curled up in a chair with Harry Potter. When a house is used to capacity it is like a heart being exercised well. Sitting next to Ragan, who took over Matthew’s place in a game of Chinese checkers, I touched the back of his hand. He looks so happy and handsome in the bosom of his family.
I had a long conversation yesterday afternoon with Cousin Irene. There are some places in the heart that only a member of one’s family can fill. Irene has a good mind and sense of humor, which seems to be improving with age. She has just turned seventy! My glamorous San Francisco cousin!
All unhappiness stems from a lack of freedom. It can be a mental lack or a physical lack. I am not, for instance, free to plan too far ahead in my life because I don’t yet know whether it will include a husband. Neither do I feel free to treat Ragan’s family as mine, because it isn’t. Sharing the same roof when children are here is not possible, which saddens me. So all the above comes under the category of what I don’t have. But what I also do not have is coherence. I am so unfree at this time in my mind that I feel dangerous, as if I will say something that will sabotage my own and Ragan’s happiness needlessly.
Last night, on the second anniversary of Mom’s death, Ragan asked me to marry him, something he didn’t know he was going to do when he sat down with me before the fire. Punching through his fear, he proposed, and all because I wouldn’t let him buy me clothes at Nordstrom’s for Christmas because I wasn’t his wife.
THANKSGIVING DAY
Last night I found red roses between the front and storm doors. May 20th will be our day said the card.
I am aware of needing to make myself psychologically ready for marriage. There needs to be room for it. At the moment, the comfort of being together is intense. The unfamiliar, unexpected security of having a partner washes over me, changes the landscape the way flowers do. But when I do not spend enough time alone, I begin to wither. Solitude keeps me porous and pliable, the way seawater keeps kelp from drying out.
It has been two weeks since we decided to marry. This last week was a surprisingly flat, even negative experience. Having burst out of a room that was too small, now we are in a room too vast. Can we fill it?
Elizabeth Ely’s comment about Ragan: “He could lead a small life but he’s not made for it.”
I have prayed for the opportunity to love a man deeply and it has been granted, but to do it I must dig much deeper into my reserves of love than I’ve ever had to dig before. Last night I looked at him from this place of commitment for the first time. I see!
READING FROM PEMA CHODRON’S WHEN THINGS FALL APART
The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new. Make friends with that clinging. Get to know it and it will let go by itself.
My thought: When you climb up a mountain, each cleft in the face gives you a toehold that enables you to lift yourself higher. But the minute you are higher, the cleft below becomes useless or irrelevant except as a marker. The next, higher place to put your foot is what you must search for now. So it is with any truth. If we cling to it, instead of using it to gain greater enlightenment, we remain in the same place.
* * *
I wonder if the process of aging doesn’t bring as its chief gift the capacity to separate our intellect from our feelings. A sixteen-year-old can know one thing but be emotionally incapable of acting upon it. At sixteen, the emotional needs must come first if the heart is to survive. Perhaps this is true at every age, but at sixty-six, I am no longer hungry in that old starving way. Even if all my sources of comfort were to vanish, I would know how to create new ones.
* * *
2005
NEW YEAR’S DAY, IN CARMEL WITH RAGAN
Yesterday morning things came to a head; in Safeway, I felt briefly as if I were going to faint. The cause? A sudden sense that I had made a terrible mistake: I was with the wrong man in the wrong life. Ragan’s temper was flaring at every small thing—tailgating drivers, the construction going on next door. Finally, back home, I expressed my own anger, telling him that I would not live with this ever. We discussed the fact that he views a wife as the lover—confidante of his whole life. I said that put too much pressure on me. I asked him what he thought was the purpose of his life. He didn’t know. After retreating to his room, he finally came out and said that there were three ways for him to deal with this—run, ignore it, or face it. He chose the last.
I must remember that what Ragan thinks and what he reveals are two different things most of the time. It would be a mistake to underestimate him.
I am finding R sweet again. He is trying manfully to get above his moods, his temper, his easily bruised feelings. I am not sure what I am trying to overcome, but here I am sleeping beside him every night, living alongside him every day, and like a pair of threads we are weaving ourselves into each other’s lives.
This morning the wind is whistling through the trees and around the cottage. The kettle mimics the sound with a whistle of its own. A fire burns quietly in the grate, filling the room with the smell of wood smoke.
I think the temptation or desire to control Ragan’s perceptions of life, to make him see it my way, is the major way I sin against humility.
I am learning how to live with someone. I have lived life for so long on my own terms, without anyone in the other room, coughing, running water, letting me know he is there. And this morning, as I sit here in the living room, journal on my knee, I am grateful for the lessons. All the ways in which we are different remain. Perhaps we will decide that they are too many to surmount, that we are asking too much of ourselves to marry. But I am also aware of something else that seems to be pushing to the front of my consciousness. Could it be the simple sincerity of his love for me? Are my fears of being cut off from life, tethered and curtailed, lodged more in my imagination than in reality? How often we equate one with the other. I am content to wait, to let time tell me what I don’t know.
I’m beginning to realize anew that every day must be created from nothing. This is particularly true when living with someone else. Peace must continually be drawn out of discord. Something as small as making a cup of coffee can get in the way. (“Let me make it.” “No, you don’t make it strong enough.” “Yes, I do.”)
To quote Mary Oliver, our time here in Carmel has “thickened with incident.” In the process, Ragan and I are becoming companions. A sign of the increasing ease and intimacy we have with each other is found in my ability to sit in the same room with him, as I am now, in silence, which must be a relief to him. He has never had so many demands upon him to think and communicate. But being able to have real conversations means too much to me to go without it.
We took Ragan’s granddaughter Brittany and my niece Devon down the coast for dinner. Big Sur in the winter has bright green pastures, full rivers, dark damp woods. We rush down the highway in a heated car, the way one rushes past a truth that is powerful and silent and not altogether friendly. Reality is on the other side of the window.
Teenage girls are inscrutable. At dinner, Ragan and I labored to get Devon and Brittany to talk, to uncork them. But they sat across the table, mostly silent and unconscious of our desperate conversational ploys. A lot of panning for a little gold.
Just before sundown Ragan and I drove down to Garrapata Ridge in Big Sur and took a road high up the side of the mountain to a friend’s house. Such sheer cliffs and sheer beauty is rarely found in combination. There was one harrowing switchback curve after another, each slice in the mountain revealing another view of deep canyons, pleated hills, and sudden thousand-foot drops. The house was a welcome lantern at the top. The sec
ond time I drive up that ridge, I won’t be so terrified. We ended farther down Route l, at Deetjen’s, my favorite restaurant in the world, for dinner. In this rustic low-ceilinged roadside cottage by the ocean, with a roaring fire and a flute quintet playing quietly through the speakers, everything was harmonious and real.
Ash Wednesday. Awoke early, worrying over my inability to make time for what is important. Everything hangs on good health, and it has been months since I’ve exercised. How to lead a contemplative life while married, how to lead a physically disciplined life, how to lead the life of a working writer. These are the questions I would like to address. The underlying fear of exertion has always slowed me down. Why the fear of inactivity doesn’t hold the same charge I do not know.
Last night I was kept awake by the prospect of chaos and change—the great disarray into which Ragan and I are heading as we try to combine two households. Just the small amount of chaos redoing the upstairs bathroom entails is difficult. How will it be when entire walls are sledge-hammered to the ground? I don’t know, but this morning, with a cup of coffee in my hand and a silent house, it seems doable.
Last night, Ragan and I celebrated my birthday early at the Manakin Grill, where we had gotten back together in May of last year. It is a quieter one than last year, but what deep joy I feel with Ragan, who has given me so many reasons to love him. No one could have prepared me for this.
The Journal Keeper Page 19
