“I’m just waiting to die,” my father told me one August afternoon in 1987, the very month and year of his death. I often think of that moment, when I struggled not to argue with him, not to distract him. There was hopeful news yesterday on the ALS front, the slow movement toward cure. I saw it on the crawl of CNN, right after I woke with a start and sat up in bed after four hours of sleep. It was one pm and the Mineral, Virginia earthquake was just beginning to be reported. I have a long strange history of waking whenever there is a big quake anywhere. I think it has something to do with my deeply flawed electromagnetic fields. My fingerprints can’t be read and I cannot turn on water in any bathroom that operates on an electric eye. Women stare at me in washrooms as I pass from sink to sink trying to activate water and wash my hands. It is always a weird moment of tiny shame, and it is among the things I don’t understand about myself and find troubling.
At work this week I am exhausted in the night, distracting myself with as many things as I can while the patients sleep and do not require my direct attention. I am reading Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s “A Gilded Lapse of Time” and tonight have acquired the word “melismatic” in her reflections on a bee reliquary. To place bee and reliquary in a single line affects me to a degree I can hardly express even to myself. To find out that melisma can be defined in terms of Handel’s Messiah just elevates the degree of delight to something approaching full mental collapse from pure joy. It occurs to me that my extreme fatigue might actually be operating in my favor, for it mitigates my ecstatic response to this book of poetry I purchased in 1992 and then put away until just now. Things always come for me at the right time, and I am amazed by the way this truth continues to unfold around me.
I am preparing for our twelfth year celebrating the Days of the Dead. As the time approaches I scan the famous dead and make my lists, planning the altars that will be made and the final cut that will allow a handful of the deceased to be presented to the Virgin of Guadalupe in my transformed dining room. My old colleague James Ebert will be the guardian of this year’s altar, and I’ve thought to present him in a format that will commingle his mountaineering achievements with the voyage of Dante through the dark wood up into the white rose of Paradise. Jim was the sweetest adult man I ever met, a man utterly without guile and powerful enough that he never spoke of his climbing at all while we worked together caring for the mentally ill. He was a god in that world, and I never knew anything about it until he died on a mountain in California last month. His heart burst open. Right now he stands on my kitchen altar in a white frame, but in two months he will be on the main altar with the Lady of the Americas.
The summer passes away. I am watching the hummingbirds overfeed as they prepare for their autumn journey across the Gulf. I add a bromeliad with a tiny pink pineapple to the Buddha garden. I put out solar prints I’ve made, right down in the flowers. I set out paper butterflies, in the bushes and on the old Victorian firescreens behind the three Buddhas. The white butterflies love these Buddhas, and prefer to drink from the stone of their bodies after I water the area. I noticed this last month and now I always wet down the Buddhas and watch the butterflies gather on the stone and drink as that particular smell of wet stone rises in the warm air.
Before coming to work tonight I find a huge spider in the corner of the bathroom. He’s a jumper. I’m running late but I watch him and decide the rest of the family will not be pleased to see him there. I put a glass over him and slide a greeting card underneath him. Out into the heavy night we go, and I put him on a leaf before returning to the bathroom to apply eyeliner and some purple eyeshadow and my favorite mixture of lilac and red pommade for my cheekbones. I spray my hair down with the same rosewater I use to comb the cat and which I love to force on Kim and Tim for grooming purposes, right out of the fridge where I keep it chilled. Back out into the dark which is like daylight for me, it is so ordinary. Off to the hospital to solve problems and try to stay alert and present. How much it is like that singing of a single syllable over a text of successive notes is striking and wonderful. I am sure if I could get a little more sleep I would understand everything. That is still my favorite among all my many illusions.
