The Book of Resting Places
Page 15
When a tree is removed, my book on New York’s trees tells me, there’s “a hole in our understanding of the city.” “Sometimes people love something to death,” it says, describing why a particular tree is so well hid. “I’d like to rough that person up. It’s a death sentence!” my mother adds when she hears of a tree on her block someone has cut into with a knife, deep enough that the xylem can no longer carry water up its trunk.
This makes sense, I think. I’d love them to death too—these mundane forms of resurrection we walk by every day.
Another feng shui discussion my girlfriend and I have concerns the patchwork quilt. It sits folded on the red armchair that the cats like to scratch. My mother gave me this quilt for my birthday a few years ago. It is a mourning quilt, sewn together from scraps of my father’s old clothes: a faded baby blue T-shirt with Mr. Right written across its chest; an old Mets shirt; the brim of a hat from Indian Lake, its stitched-on patch of Adirondacks and water. She has sewn likenesses of past family pets into the quilt—the yellow-gray cockatiel, an E for the dead dog.
For years, my mother did not know what to do with these old things. Now she has found a way—“Surprise! Happy birthday!”—for them to always stay with me. I am not to hang the quilt on the wall or use it as a decorative throw. My explicit instructions remain that I sleep underneath it. It’s this that my girlfriend objects to: she does not want to use her boyfriend’s dead father’s clothes for warmth. And so the mourning quilt is relegated to the armchair, and I unfold it when I am cold and lying on the couch and reading about trees.
I have learned the hard way that when someone you love dies, the real shame of it is that your memory of them dies as well.
You end up with the silliest remnants. Like how my father, the Brazilian immigrant who spoke like the British if the British didn’t try to speak like themselves, never fully learned prepositional nuance. How he often confused his instructions: “Get on the car,” he’d say instead of “in.” “Climb out” instead of “up.” Or how the back half of “Adirondacks,” in his mouth, became the frozen rum cocktail you sip with an umbrella and neon straw.
We can’t really help forgetting, I don’t think. I assign as much malice to it as I assign to the tree who steals another’s sunlight. When it comes down to it, you do what you do to survive.
When the English sewed the earliest iterations of books from trees, they called these codex—a quire of pages stitched together, four parchment sheets folded to form eight leaves. They took the word from its Latin root, caudex: a block of wood or tree trunk.
After I move (new job, new town) and box up all my scattered books, my girlfriend buys me a broadside. I nail it to my wall. It’s an excerpt from About Trees, a book in which the visual artist, Katie Holten, compiles various arboreal-themed texts using an invented tree typography. A is an apple; Q, a quaking aspen; E, an elm; C, a cedar; acorns as periods, and so on and so forth. Most of the trees, except for the conifers, lack leaves and so their bare forms on the page appear spectral, skeletal.
Holten’s art collapses the difference between what something’s made of and what something’s made to mean. About Trees, Ida Bencke writes in her introduction, turns “language . . . back in on itself” when “matter and mattering are yet to be separated.” It is “a memento of the arborescent nature of every book: that each piece of printed matter was once wood.”
I would add to Bencke’s claim, that if every piece of printed matter was once wood, then it was also once human.
What I’m talking about is not so very difficult. Lye, sodium sulfate, what the Germans call the kraft process. An American elm in the North Meadow of Central Park. Cut through a branch or gather its leaves. Watch out for widow makers. Put the branch in a black garbage bag and carry it over one’s shoulder the way one carries a body. If it’s the right season, people would mistake it for a Christmas tree. Saw the wood, flake it, oatmeal it into pulp. Then a mother’s casserole dish, a screen coaxed across a frame, a jar of soaked sodium hydroxide. Matter and mattering. Another way to break down wood. Repeat and repeat until noon or so and you hold these pages in your hands, your job of taking the broken and discarded and finding a new and useful arrangement.
These memories I have of my father, however silly, become precious. I grasp at anything that resists the word disappear, the word gone. Now his prepositions seem almost magical, as if his mistake could create a new reality. In the gap between the word he said and the word he meant, both somehow existed at once.
So that if I buried you under the right tree, eventually you would return. I would sit in the living room with my scattered books and I would hold you in my arms again. And even though you could not speak, I would read everything you had to tell me. I would underline, star, and scratch you up. You’d splay open while I ate my lunches, and I’d be careful not to spill coffee or ketchup, to crack your spine or dog-ear your corners too much. I would tell you I was sorry. Then I would fall asleep with my arms crossed over you on my chest and, for a while, I would not be so alone. I’d put you back on the bookshelf underneath your picture.
I know this would only be for a little while. Every resting place, especially this book of them, is half-lived. The pages are given up as soon as they are given over, fated to be remaindered and then recycled, a Mead journal or tax form, the glossy distended belly of a celebrity who has let himself go, the Tip #17 of 20 ways to please her between the sheets. Memory and body, already very small things, will be stripped and sinewed into pulp until someone else loses someone they love and puts pen to recycled paper and the old familiar story of metamorphosis begins again.
But in the meantime, in that pause between the word said and the word meant, wouldn’t it feel like the gods? To reach out and feel bark where there once was skin. To find the love you failed returned a thousandfold. To brush against what is and is not true—a memory that calls out its disappearance, a being on its way to becoming something else. To realize I too have inherited these prepositions. We don’t pass away, we pass on. We don’t fade away, we fade into. That the simplest way I can put it will never make sense: you come back because you left, you go away because you were always here.
Acknowledgments
Previous versions of these essays appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, CutBank, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Normal School, and Seneca Review. Thank you to the editors of those journals. Particular thanks to Doug Carlson at The Georgia Review for shepherding “Overburden” through.
Thank you to Dan Smetanka for believing in this book and everyone at Counterpoint Press: Megan Fishmann, Jenny Alton, Shannon Price, Alisha Gorder.
Thank you, Matt McGowan.
My deep gratitude to the MFA program at the Univer-sity of Arizona. In particular: Kate Bernheimer. Alison Deming. Ander Monson, the proverbial 3D-printed owl who watched over this all, dispensing and withholding wisdom. Manuel Muñoz, for being a close enough reader to point out this was Ander’s role. The following friends and readers: Kati Standefer, Maya L. Kapoor, Lawrence Lenhart, Nick Greer, Will Slattery, Ingrid Wenzler, Kirk Wisland, and many others.
Thank you to Jennifer Brice and Colgate University for giving me the time and opportunity to work on the book through the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship. D. J. Thielke for the granola. Thank you as well to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the MacDowell Colony.
My aunts, Abigail and Eliza Thomas, have for years read whatever I’ve sent and responded with encouragement, even when undeserved. I wrote many of these essays with my grandfather Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) in mind.
I was once voted most likely to thank my cat in the Acknowledgments.
Thank you, Sarah Minor, for the tough and the love. Without you, this book wouldn’t exist.
I wrote this in dedication to my mother, Judy Thomas, and father, Rafael Mira y Lopez (1947–2006).
Author photograph © Ellee Achten
About
the Author
thomas mira y lopez is from New York City. He earned an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona, and his work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review Online, and The Normal School, among other publications. He currently lives in North Carolina, where he is the 2017–2018 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.