WARTIME WINTER
Grounded by the Light
When I’m making something beautiful and strange I can’t explain, I’m something they can’t touch. - JHF
LATE THURSDAY NIGHT I FELT A JOLT when “JANUARY 19th” jumped out from a web page. Had I missed our anniversary only five years after Kathy died? It’s bound to happen someday but not yet, please God. A moment before, I’d gone through all of it again, getting married in the courthouse back in Maryland (Jan. 16, 1981), and the corner of my iMac screen did in fact read “Jan 15th...” Shaking my head, I realized they were telling me the bank would close for Martin Luther King Day and I was saved.
The next day though—Friday the 16th—I had to drive 70 miles to Santa Fe for a “device check” on my pacemaker. This had come up suddenly because of the “PMT has occurred” alert in the monthly scan transmitted to my cardiologist from my bedside monitor. No biggie, though. Apparently it needed tweaking to keep my heart rate from bumping up too much if I started walking briskly. While I was sitting in the examining room with a ring-shaped sensor on my chest, the nurse said, “I’m going to turn your heart rate up to 90 to check on something...”
“You can do that right now from where you’re standing?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“What power,” I muttered, wondering what else she could do by tapping on a screen. Dial me up some muscles, maybe, fix my eyes and ears. “You didn’t change my resting heart rate, did you?” I asked when we were finished. “Oh no,” she said, and I was glad I hadn’t made her mad.
The drive home was uneventful yet exciting. I hit 85 mph passing a beat-up Subaru on a long downgrade in the canyon. Climbing out past Pilar, there was cellular service again. With my hearing aids connected to the iPhone 15 ProMax via bluetooth, Siri read a text into my ears:1
“Hello! Your storage unit has not been properly locked. For security reasons I ask that you come and relock unit (making sure both latches are pushed to the right). Any questions, please call me. Thank you, Alice”
By this time I was tired and starving but I knew I had to detour. Another 40 minutes added to my trip because the units were on the other side of town, though the view across the valley smoothed me out. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some fool has stolen everything. Late Friday afternoon traffic at the downtown four-way stop signs was a mess. I almost T-boned someone in a white Suburban with dark tinted windows who waited too long to make his move but didn’t honk and let me brazen my way through. When I made it to the north-side Hinds & Hinds and entered my passcode, the greeting was a benediction: “Hello John, you are granted access.”
The place was empty, wet from melting snow, and plenty cold in fading sunlight. Splashing through the puddles, tires crunching on the gravel, no one anywhere. No, I hadn’t closed the latch, but I liked that I was all alone and it was quiet. After locking the unit with a satisfying “clack,” I was in the groove. A minute later a different keypad’s tiny screen granted “exit” and I rumbled home, double-blessed past traffic, mud, and snarling dogs.
When Kathy died, an aspiring idiot savant in Taos told me I would too unless I got a dog. I read an article that claimed this might improve the odds for widowers, something about hearts and electrical fields, but that was all. I didn’t want relief from grief2 and besides, he pissed me off. I also thought I needed to get away from Taos and wanted to explore without the “hassle” of a pet. Hassle might not be the right word. We always had cats and boarded them for road trips, but it’s harder to leave a dog.3
The best and last dog I ever had I raised from a puppy in Wharton, Texas after divorcing my first wife. (Not the same dynamic, I was glad to see her go.) Lady the Wonder Dog, a white German shepherd mix, was the perfect companion when I dropped out to build a cabin in the Ozarks in ‘71, moved to Austin in ‘72, gave Maine a chance in ‘75, and later that same year settled into ancestral haunts on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where I met Kathy. Both ladies got along just fine. The three of us went to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in ‘78 on an epic six-week journey in a ‘65 VW via Des Moines, where I had the engine rebuilt for $400; Manhattan, Kansas where someone stole our tent and gear; Laredo, Texas; Saltillo, Mexico; and all the way back through Austin and up the East Coast. Twice a year we’d visit Iowa in all kinds of weather, camping or staying in motels. I don’t remember any trouble traveling with a dog except in darkest Pennsylvania during an awful blizzard, where we skidded off the interstate in freezing slush and landed at a motel with a “no pets” rule. The lobby was full of stranded families with crying kids and people waiting to use the phone. The manager had one last room though, so I lied, hid Lady, and kept her quiet to give us shelter from the storm.
(Her eventual demise was not entirely her fault, poor soul, though all is intertwined.)
Meanwhile, the world is in a state and here at 7,000 feet the path ahead’s not clear at all. There were aptitude tests in high school in West Texas and New York that said I was perfect for a forest fire lookout job where I could also read and make art. That may have been a way to weed out beatnik weirdo types for counseling, but I always thought being close to Nature was the highest ideal on Earth and still do. On the other hand, Kathy used to say we’d “used up Taos” and I know the feeling. (That was years ago, too.) I’m restless, getting older, “everyone is dead,” and what if I can’t drive or chop wood? Ah, but I still can. I simply want to go out making art and doing good.
Before my sinus node went south, I realized there are no mistakes, not ever. I’ve done some things I’d rather bury at the bottom of the sea, but even those reflected a singular constellation of time and space and consciousness. Everything I was. You do it or you don’t. If instead I think something like, I never should have let myself be driven mad with fear, I’m conjuring a ghost, the man who never was. Everything must be just fine then, and I probably think too much. We are love. Own it and move on.
You know about the troubles, or you should. Nothing will ever be the same again, except—perhaps—the quality of life available at any moment in whatever world this is. “Be here now,” the man said half an hour north of here in ‘71 and he was right.4
Windblown snow at sunset on the hill. A 17-year-old image of a woman and a cat. Her red wool scarf around my neck that keeps me warm. The deep bass roar from my Dakota when I push the pedal down. The resonance of certain chords on my guitar—the way they “bark” and ring. The flow of words that elicit things I can’t describe. Sliding into fresh sheets under double comforters on a cold night after a long hot bath. Warm skin that isn’t mine. Feeling all right in my heart. The pride I feel when I see people shouting down the goons. But most of all the Light. The blazing, blinking, flowing light that makes me happy. The color of the air, the hot hope of the Sun.
Handy while you’re driving. Kinda.
Take the medicine, let it change me.
Don’t get me started on the fate of family pets and Air Force brats.
Baba Ram Dass at Lama.
Lovely writing, John, as always, and your photography is up to the task of complementing the words. All your pictures consistently remind me of what I experience every trip to New Mexico; it is all about the light.
Beautiful piece. That tension between wanting to flee grief versus letting it reshape us is something I've grappled with too, especally after losing a close friend. The part about there being no mistakes, just unique constellations of time and consciouness, puts a different spin on regret that feels more freeing. Makes me wonder if thats the key to aging gracefully, accepting all of it as necessary.