MISSION STRESS
Garbage, Death, and Burro Guides
I’ve sold or donated her clothes and thrown away the shoes. The makeup and lotions in the bathroom are gone. I cleaned out the studio and sold her baby grand. The dressers in the bedroom are mine now. I cheated with the jewelry, gone from drawers but hidden in the bathroom in a cardboard box. Saved all the pretty scarves. Of course I did. Boxes of sheet music and textbooks dying in the storage unit. I still have her academic gown and cap. Her childhood piano is in there too and I would like to keep it. You can hardly even give these artifacts away. Things that she revered that no one cares about, just how it is. There’s a hutch of fine china, more placemats and napkins than I’ll ever use. Beautiful glasses and all kinds of silverware. Some I can sell but not all. Finally took her mother’s old living room chairs to the Taos County landfill. There are cartons of family memorabilia her sister and brother don’t want. Ten years down the road some grandkid will wonder where the photos of Fielda, Jack, and Gram are and I’m supposed to burn it all?
West Germany late ‘55
WHY DID DADDY HAVE A GUN? It was so incongruous for him. The other souvenirs and tools made at least a little sense when Johnny went spying on Major Farr: carved wooden puzzles from Okinawa, tiny glass animals from Japan, Trojan skins, Air Force insignia, Zippo lighters, slide rule, flat plastic calculators, pilot pills, foreign coins, and pen knives. I looked at his clothes and went through the pockets. I tried on his shoes. The electric razor with its bitter oily smell. I tested the aftershave, sniffed unopened cigarettes. Somewhere in there was my father I guess. The gun though. Holy grail of whatever incompleteness pulled me into their bedroom when they were out. All I did at first was open his nightstand drawer and stare. Eventually I dared to pick it up. The Colt M1911 .45 caliber semi-automatic was cold and heavy and scared me good. I knew enough about guns to figure out the bullets were in a magazine and learned to take them out and put them back. To this day I remember how the wooden grip covers felt in my 10-year-old hands and the weight of the thing. I don’t know if John or Helen ever found me out but one day it was gone and I was glad.1
When the old man was dying of lung cancer in ‘87 I flew out to Tucson from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I remember knocking on the trailer door after dark. When they let me in—I can’t see who was there now—I walked right over to the hospital bed they’d set up in the living room for him to die on. There was a potty seat of some sort close at hand. He was propped up in a sitting position so he wouldn’t drown just yet with a tube stuck up his nose, swollen nearly twice his size it seemed, pale as sin, and looked like someone else. “J-Johnny,” he croaked and hardly moved. I was shocked and don’t remember what I said but at least we shared the contact. I spent the night in his room on his regular bed and maybe slept a little. In the morning the hospice lady said, “It’s soon.” He wanted to pee, of course. I understood. My brother Bill and I lifted him onto the potty seat and that was all she wrote. He wheezed like a locomotive for a minute, exhaled one last bubble that didn’t pop, and I fell down on the bed in fetal position screaming “NO, NO, NO” while the empty flesh bag settled on the potty seat. After I got quiet my brother and I lifted him back onto the bed. There is nothing more limp than a fresh dead body with no pumping heart and it was hard. I think I closed his eyes. Only other time I ever touched him on the face was when he let Johnny feel his whiskers once before he shaved.
A gasping “Johnny” from a dying man is at least some kind of closure. The long goodbye of dementia is more like watching someone sink into the slowest quicksand in the world. When my sweetheart got her angel wings, she couldn’t talk and hadn’t been well enough to use her phone to call me from stroke rehab for two whole weeks. Because of COVID visitor restrictions, I never once got in to see her before she went into septic shock. At the end I held her while she looked me in the eyes as long as she could manage. Most intimate thing we ever did. If not for that and 40 years of sharing I never would have made it this far in the aftermath. The Universe provides though. It takes the hard ones way too long to see but if you only feel it once you realize. All memories and love go back into the stars and something knows.
Recently I was driving up a washboard road through pristine forests and alpine meadows above 9,000 feet. The clanging and the banging were unbearable. I’d recently had the ball joints and sway bar bushings replaced on my 2001 Dodge Dakota so every jolt was personal like vandalism from an entity that hated me. My companion and I saw elk and deer and turkeys.2 There were clumps of wild iris out there in the spiny grass. We took photographs in places where the wind blew cold and clean as the sun was getting low but even Nature couldn’t save me. I was locked in neurotic obsession, resistant to anything that might have helped. Poor old truck and poor old John, trapped in a loop of my own making. The lady might have hitchhiked back if there were only traffic. Sensing trouble, I nudged the speed up and pushed on. The paved highway was only 30 miles ahead and no one had done wrong.
The asphalt offered smooth relief and I lightened up a bit. As we rolled into Cimarron the sun had almost set, but I realized the Philmont Scout Ranch was just four miles away and had to see it again. Time and place. There are no coincidences. The highway follows the original Santa Fe Trail. The vistas roll beneath the brilliant insane sky. Kathy and I visited the Villa Philmonte once and had a picnic under tall green cottonwoods with deer and turkeys on the lawn. The valley by the mountains looking out across the plains resonates like home. There are different kinds of “home,” I think, and all exist in spirit. Landscapes, people—even animals—light them up inside so we can see. The medicine is everywhere, watch out.
The wild West isn’t fiction here. Kit Carson took a breather from Taos in 1849 and moved to Rayado a few miles past the current ranch to chase Comanches and Apaches for Lucien Maxwell. Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Black Jack Ketchum, Wild Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, and other notables stayed at the Lambert Inn in Cimarron—later named the St. James Hotel—where “Who was killed at Lambert’s last night?” was the local saying. Built by Henry Lambert, Abraham Lincoln’s personal chef, the dining room ceiling had two hardwood layers to shield sleeping guests upstairs from bullets!
Heading back to Cimarron we came around a bend and shot right past a scattered herd of Philmont burros in a pasture. They were wondrous ancient-looking beasts with crosses on their backs and came right up to the fence. All at once the world was easy and there was no pain. As I stood there with my camera in that windy sunset river of love, I felt the demon let me go.
Last week I had new Bilstein shock absorbers installed on the truck but the front end clanked a little and I wondered if the washboard road had damaged it. Then three days ago after driving to the grocery store, I noticed there was smoke coming from under the hood. The serpentine belt was partly melted with droplets of hot black goop all over the pulley. Oh, hell! I’d had the AC on for the first time in years to clear some condensation and the compressor must have seized Somehow I got the Dakota to my favorite garage with the belt almost on fire squealing musically and left it. As long as it was going to be there for a while, I also told the service advisor about the clanks. Today I learned what they had found. It turned out the front end work I’d had done before at a different place was botched but now I knew and my garage could fix it! This made me so happy I didn’t mind the seized compressor. They even offered me the cheap solution of a bypass pulley but the AC had never worked right on the Dodge. “Just do everything!” I said, wondering if this were really me. I swear to God the whole thing made me high.
The same day a squirrel ate all the blossoms off six petunia plants I was saving for my friend and yet I didn’t kill him. Then a really big man showed up outside banging on my screen door talking fast. He claimed to be a neighbor, said he needed $20 for a “new fan belt,” and had a plan. For that much I’d get $40 worth of firewood (half-price!) and of course he’d fetch it later. The guy was awfully good but I was miles ahead and flying. By the time we finished I’d said no and he said thank you, though he might have rolled his eyes. “It’s hot out here,” he yelled over his shoulder as he walked back up the hill, and that was deadly true.
Standard U.S. military issue, the weapon may have been required in the old man’s case (squadron commander) at least until ‘57 when the British, French, and American occupation zones reverted to Bundesrepublik control.
I may have conjured up the deer but did omit a rogue pronghorn in the woods.
You did it again! I was not sure, at first, but you circled back and pulled it together.
Zeke’s got it right?