Echoes in a Hollow Space

My hands remember
what mind does not: just so my
father planted beans.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I’ve long been fascinated by Green Men. I’ve only figured out recently that this may be because my own father was a Green Man.

It’s funny the things that set you to remembering.

The other day when I was in the cafeteria at work, I had a semi-meaningless conversation about pickles. That conversation sparked a memory so keen I had to write it down immediately.

My father planted a vast vegetable garden every year in the immense back yard of our rental property in Venice. He had no tolerance for flowers and, like as not, he’d pull them up if he needed more space for edibles.

Still, the garden he planted was a work of art: lovingly conditioned soil, weeks in churning and amending, row upon neat little row of carrot, onion, parsnip, red radish, bell pepper. Beyond those rows, beautifully rounded little mounds held cucumber, ringed round with carefully dug irrigation channels. The leaves of the cucumbers were hairy and pointy-edged, the stems thick and fuzzy, bobbing green in the summer breeze, yellow in the fall. The tomato plants on the other side of the cucumbers always started in orderly, well-staked rows, but by fall they danced in an entwined frenzy. Along the back fence, wire with a spiky top, banana squash climbed. Sometimes corn grew beside it.

Between the back fence crops and the tomatoes ran an arbor for string beans—a porous frame of wood and chicken wire during the fallow months, ten feet tall and perhaps twenty feet long. In the summer months, though, it became a green tunnel as the beans climbed up the sides and over the top. The sun shone liquid green through the leaves, and even in the hottest summer the earth beneath—near-black with fecundity and never dried completely during the growing season—felt cool to my bare feet. That soil made all things seem possible. I would wander up and down it daydreaming, getting a buzz from the green smell of the beans.

If ever there was a place my soul felt repose, it was there. I suspect my father felt the same way. He preferred spending time in his garden, in the green bean tunnel, to time with my mother and I. Perhaps that wasn’t so, just my perception, but it felt to me as if he couldn’t find a way to bridge the gap between that shining green light and the warmth of the hearth. After the day’s gardening, he seemed empty and at a loss. The demons that tormented him grew thicker in the air.

He’d nearly reached retirement age by the time I was born. When I was small, I adored helping him in the garden, just being with him. When I hit puberty, our worldviews had grown too divergent. At least two generations separated us, and only in the green space had we any hope of reaching across the decades. Even in puberty, the garden and that cool green tunnel seemed like a magic place. When the churning of my brain and growing body got to be too much, I’d return to it and wander up and down. I had this feeling, way down deep, that if I could just make it to the end of that tunnel, the true end, not the one I saw with my eyes, I’d be changed. Or maybe all my wishes would be granted. I never made it that far.

I’d see Dad in the tunnel, slowly walking up and down, lifting the bean pods tenderly in his hands to check their progress, seeing if they were ready for the ritual of the canning process. Mom and I were not allowed near the kitchen when the canning sacrament was underway. Mornings in late summer and early fall, I’d wake to the smell of green beans cooking, ready for the mason jars; or dill, alum, and vinegar boiling to turn fresh-picked cucumbers into the best pickles in the world. An astringent smell, but to me it held the promise of something delicious in the heart of winter.

I still see my father in that garden, and wonder what he found when he took the final walk to the end of that shining green tunnel. I wonder if his wishes came true?

There’s a quote from Vincent Van Gogh that reminds me of my father: “I am a burning hearth. People see the smoke, but no one comes to warm themselves.”

But there’s another quote from Albert Camus I like much better, and hope applies to Dad equally well: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

The purring of a small plane overhead...the soft but continual purr of Min sitting beside the keyboard...the shush and whisper of jet engines in the distance, their low rumble beneath...the high-pitched soprano of windchimes, the basso gong beside them, the alto bells joining in...the insistent caw of a young crow...the quiet hum of my computer...someone outside whistling a loud and lively version of "When the Saints Come Marchin' In"...the wild finches' adamant imprecations, their musical laughs...the barely perceptible whumpf of the ceiling fan turning...a car growling up the street...the snick of the pen hitting the floor when Min knocks it off...the scrape of leaves being raked...the exhalation of tires on asphalt...a remote cria of a siren...the creak of my chair as I lean towards a sound...a single whoop of female laughter...a male child's strident protest, too distant to form words...the sigh of fabric shifting across my leg...the staccato chatter of a windblown leaf...the hollow clunk of a hinged plastic garbage can lid falling open...leaves crackling as they fall inside...a dog barking, so far away it's like a memory..."No, Mommmmmyyyyy!" and a girlish squeal...two short, pointed car horn toots...more whirling fall of wild finch notes...more voices, more, more children, car doors...the neighborhood is rousing, sluggish after the night's disturbances...

When I was a young girl we had a landlady named Mrs. J. who had, when she was a young girl, survived the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. She talked about it occasionally, but not much. Maybe nobody asked. Or maybe, like many survivors of trauma, it wasn't something she wanted to talk about.

( Read more. )

I've been thinking all week about a friend of mine I haven't seen in some years now, who left my life just about this time of the year. It was partly sparked by a conversation I had over the weekend at jefffunk's place after his trip to Babylon. It got me thinking about another time and another place, a different me. Then everyonesakitty touched me with her remembrance of lost friends. So I thought maybe it was time to write this down, to remember my friend.

His name was Mark.

Mark and I knew each other for twelve years, from the time we were sweet young things—infants playing at adulthood. Mark was a sweet young thing: big brown eyes and an innocent and trusting soul. He'd do my hair and instead of the usual dishing, we got into some soulful conversations. Okay, we did the usual dishing, too, but mostly became the scandal of the salons for the serious talks we had. So when Mark got tired of salons and asked if I wouldn't mind coming to his house for the hair sessions, I did. We had even more soulful conversations after that. He'd tell me how he longed to see his family, but how he didn't go up north for visits often. He'd been raised in a really strict and narrowly-focused religious sect, and his family all pretty much believed he was going to burn in hell for moving to L.A. and living his lifestyle. His mom was okay—she did think he would burn in hell, but she wanted to see her baby boy and welcomed him home. But his step dad pretty much preached to him the whole time, emphasizing how his soul was doomed and how he would burn.

"How can he say that? How can he believe that?" I asked in outrage.

"That's just the way they believe."

"I'm sorry, but I can't believe in a God like that, who would make someone gay, then punish them for His own handiwork. I cannot believe a merciful God would do that."

"Maybe you're right," Mark would say mildly. I knew I'd said too much and shut up.

Once or twice he confessed to me that deep inside he believed he was damned, too. He'd been raised that way. Kind of hard to shake it.

I don't think Mark played the field much, but his longtime live-in did. All I know for sure is that one day, he said, "We've broken up and he's moved out." That was all I could get out of him. I don't know if Mark became HIV positive through his lover's amours or his own—because we never really discussed the fact that he was HIV positive. See, this was in the bad old days, the worst days of The Plague, when persecution was still a real possibility. Doctors didn't know much about AIDS, no drugs had been developed to keep it in remission. AIDS gave only the promise of a young death back then. I knew a number of gay friends who didn't discuss their HIV even with other gay friends. You just never knew who would go into a panic and cut you dead. People were fired from their jobs, driven out of their homes and neighborhoods and schools. It was ugly.

Sometimes we'd talk all around the issue, Mark and me, about the stringent health regime he was on, how there was a lot of nasty stuff circulating out there, how you couldn't know if some little bug would turn fatal, about how he'd given up dating. Our eyes would meet and I'd swear he knew that I knew. I should have just had the courage to say, "I know and I'm okay with it." But I didn't. I kept going back to the same thought: I'm intruding. It's his disease. It's his decision to share or not to share. Maybe that was just my rationalization because I lacked the courage to confront it head on.

One of those regrets I'll always carry. You need to say the things that are important when you have the chance, no matter what they are.

Anyway, Mark got sick. "A bad case of the flu, but I'm going to be okay." A bad case of the flu was often the first sign in those ugly days that full blown AIDS had arrived. Many who had AIDS never made it past this stage, but Mark had been taking really good care of himself and he pulled through. He told me to come over on Saturday and he'd cut my hair. His first Saturday of having people over and getting back to work.

For some reason I completely spaced out that day. I looked up and it was a half hour after the time I'd said I'd be there and it would take me the better part of a half hour to get there. I called Mark to grovel and apologize. Choked up, he said, "I thought you'd decided not to risk it after I'd been so sick." I said, "I would never do that to you, sweetheart. I would never do that." "I'm glad," he said, the relief pouring out of his voice. "I've got someone coming in twenty minutes, you want to do it late today?" "I don't want you to tire yourself out your first day back. Let's do it next Saturday." So we set up a time.

I didn't talk to him during the week because I knew I'd see him on Saturday. Another regret I'll carry.

I set out for Mark's good and early. As I drove through a patch of the Marina—really, one of the blandest places you can imagine, with a tacky coffee shop on one side and a not-great hotel on the other, and loaded with angry ant traffic—I suddenly got swept up in the most remarkable emotion, a sensation of pure joy, coming out of nowhere, sparked by nothing that I could determine: a synapse in my brain opened and poured forth the sweet juice of life. The world seemed to pulse with it: live this moment, and this moment, and this moment . . .

I was so excited. I couldn't wait to get to Mark's and tell him about that remarkable sensation. When I got there a middle-aged woman answered the door. A middle-aged man hovered over her shoulder. The woman had dark circles under her eyes and an air of heaviness, utter exhaustion, as if she'd been beaten and could barely stand. "Is Mark here?" I asked uncertainly.

"I'm his mother," she said. "We're just cleaning out his apartment. Mark passed away last Wednesday night."

"H-how?"

"He thought he'd beaten that pneumonia, but he hadn't. It came on very fast and they couldn't save him."

"He was such a wonderful man," I said.

Her shoulders sagged, the man standing behind her flexed his jaw a few times and stepped away from the door, out of my line of sight, and I realized—this woman and this man thought her baby boy was burning in hell. "It's nice of you to say so," she said. "I guess I should have called the people in his address book, but I didn't have the heart. Maybe later." I don't know if she ever did because none of us ever got that call. I can't say as I blame her, but I also couldn't help wondering if I would have ever known what happened to Mark if I hadn't missed seeing him the Saturday before—or if I would have just called to a disconnected phone, gone to an apartment cleaned out and rented to someone else.

So I drove back home, sobbing, and I passed that same patch of road where I'd had the remarkable feeling of joy. I thought bitterly of what a farce it had been, what an illusion. But the feeling still waited by the side of the road, a tiny flutter of remembrance and echo of feeling, and realization thumped me on the side of the head. That was the message, dummy, delivered before I knew he was dead so I would know it for what it was later on: Mark was not burning in hell. He was not.

I used to know a guy named Ed who was a Calvinist. That alone was remarkable to me—I didn't think Calvinists existed anymore, but Ed sure did. As I understand it, Calvinists are pretty strict in their beliefs about sin and morality and right behavior, so much so that one of the tenets of their faith is that when Judgment comes, only the Elect will be admitted to Heaven. And they've even come up with a calculation, derived from numbers they say are encoded in the Bible, to estimate how many human souls out of all the billions who have ever existed are going to make the cut: 144,000.

So I asked Ed if he really believed that only 144,000 souls were going to be saved come the End of Times. He nodded—one of the fast, tight-necked nods that scared people make. His eyes showed a lot of white, too, like a horse seeing a stick on the ground and thinking it's a snake. I asked him if he thought the rest of us were going to be pitched into the lake of fire. Again, that tight, white-eyed nod.

Ed was an engineer so he had a pretty good grasp of math. I can't clearly remember if I was actually impertinent enough to ask him if he thought he'd be one of the Elect—I was pretty young and tended towards impertinence, so it's possible. But looking back, I don't think I really needed to ask that question. Ed's fear was palpable, a daily ritual. Ed knew in his heart of hearts that he wasn't "good enough" by Calvinist lights.

He was the most terrified person I ever knew, if you looked beneath the surface of things. Tightly controlled, afraid of shadows, hyper-cautious about everything, every deed and morsel, extremely safety-minded and risk-averse. He always seemed a bit squirrely, ready to jump at shadows. Not hard to imagine why. If Ed truly believed in the Calvinist creed, then the thought of death had to fill him with terror. His faith, as he interpreted it, was a torture to him because he was convinced that all that awaited him when he died was the lake of fire.

I can't say that I really see the point in a belief system like that, but different strokes to different folks, as Sly Stone said. Perhaps Ed needed the fear. Or perhaps he'd been so indoctrinated at such a young age that he couldn't escape the prison of his thought patterns.

I've thought about Ed now and again over the years. When I was younger it was with shake-my-head amazement and a bit of derision. These days, it's with pity. Faith—it seems to me—needs to be a living thing, not a dying thing, though God knows many a creed has arisen that glorifies punishment. Glorifying punishment, instilling an unnatural fear of living, seems a perversion of Spirit to me. But what do I know? I am clearly not one of Ed's 144,000.

Ever since the final word count on my latest novel hit 144,000, Ed's been on my mind and I've been picturing his tight-lipped face. No, no, I'm not going to reduce and cheapen Ed's terror to a discussion of my novel. It's just on my mind a lot this morning, this afternoon, thinking about the boxes we shut ourselves inside of, the lakes of fire we sometimes create out of our own lives.

Life is about living. For all I know, this is all we've got. Spirit calls to me and I listen, but nobody really knows a thing. Not the Pope, not Billy Graham, George Bush, the Dali Lama, the imams and ayatollahs, not Ed. Not me, not anybody. There is no received wisdom that wasn't first filtered through the skull of some poor mortal, where the lines of communication are prone to misinterpretation, self-interest, cultural biases, rationalization. We're all just living inside our own skulls, making leaps of faith.

I think it's important to believe in something, to make some kind of leap of faith sometime in our life. But when I look back at Ed and folks like him, I realize they aren't making leaps of faith about anything. It seems to me that life is the true test of faith. If what you believe is not enriching your life; if it is not about living but about death and revenge and self-righteousness and judgment, then it is most likely a false faith. Spirit does not want us to "kick ass" on anybody else. Spirit wants us to concentrate on our own hearts, on making our relationship to our own souls as clear and as loving as we possibly can. Anything else is a perversion.

No lake of fire could be worse.