The Missing Piece

What is it about a broken heart that demands you go back and revisit the moment or moments of the breaking? Is it because you secretly think you will find the missing piece? Failing that, is it the hope that at least, you will find how to glue the shattered pieces back in place, one-by-one?

Or perhaps it is even more fundamental. Do you argue in your head whether your heart is actually broken? The litany repeats itself over and over. I am alive. I walk, talk, breathe. I even feel the most delicate touch, like fresh snow on my cheeks. Out of the corner of my eye, I see it glisten on the ends of my golden hair. Or maybe, it’s more stark, as the cold winter wind cuts across your face, you feel the sting so sharply that you burrow deep into your coat collar. You repeat, yes, I am alive, my lips are dull and chapped and my hands are numb. I am alive! At night, under the electric blanket, you feel a false warmth born of electricity of a different kind. You are warm, but not warmed.

You keep looking. Then it happens. Some mundane everyday event triggers the psyche and you sense you are close to finding the answer, the missing piece. It happened while I was driving to work in the darkness of an early January morning in Wisconsin. I was peering through frosted windows at white lines when it occurred to me, that I was simply making a rote drive in a rote manner. I was frozen in a moment of my own making.

I watched the ice on the windshield shatter as it met the wiperblade, swish, crush, swish, crush. After time, what didn’t get caught by the blade slowly began to melt. The heat from within and warmed the glass. I watched the ice crystals as they became drops, then small rivulets and then they simply disappeared. It was suddenly so clear; I wasn’t going to find the missing piece.

To focus on the missing piece meant I had to remain frozen. I had to release the moment or permit the wiperblade to cut again and again. I had to allow all the disparate parts to melt and form a new whole. They would, like the drops on the windshield, melt until no one drop was distinguishable from the others. This release, this melting, is the hardest part. It requires a warmth born of faith in yourself and in the promise that even the coldest winter will end. It requires time and a conscious choice to let it happen. It requires giving up the piece for the whole.

A special tribute

...to Walter Cronkite tonight on CBS. He is 90. He cried at one point on the show, which was clips of his life "on the air" and comments from his colleagues across all networks and walks of life and his personal comments about his life.

He apologized for the tears and then I realized, if he could weep, so could I. It was in the segment on JFK's assassination. That wound is still there for America, for him, for me and so many others.

Such a contrast to the "spin doctors" of today. He negotiated Egypt and Israel sitting at the same table from the "evening news." How much better can it get than that?" Well, having the first Beatles interview prior to Ed Sullivan - I am sure comes in there some where.

And sad, how far away have we strayed in terms of today's "take" on the news? We trusted him and today we "filter."

To watch the program was to watch my life...from my tender college years through today...it put so much in perspective.

I am going to try and get the video/dvd for me, my daughters, and all my friends...we all need to watch, feel, and learn.

...and that is the way it is, May 18th 2007.

Mother's Day without the Mother

I have been thinking about death, not just death in the abstract, but my Mother’s death. She died nine days before Christmas and was buried three days later on a very cold December morning. I think when you bury your last parent something profound shifts within. However, I did not know that as I sat on those cold steel chairs under the canopy at the cemetery listening to the minister read the last scripture. It was visualizing the moment they lowered the casket into the vault that I felt forever old. I wanted to watch it lower, but the funeral-people are very careful about those things and they usher you away. It would have been easier to watch.

I am reading Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” to more clearly understand why I was not my usually rational Virgo self. I was not. I had not prepared my daughters very well for this moment either. They were both married with children and had lives apart from mine – apart in both distance and connection. My former husband and his wife of twenty-some years came. He was a pall bearer. It was such an act of kindness for my Mother never stopped loving him, but neither have I. I am not referring to romantic love, but the love of a soul who has known you in your youth and watched you grow along with the children, our children. No other man has ever had that opportunity.

When you lose the person with whom you took your first breath there is a vast emptiness. It is an interior loneliness. No one will ever know you in the same way and that person is gone. We disagreed on many things some of which were quite important, but in the end she was Mother, and I, daughter and it overrode all else. In some ways it gave us permission to explore our differences because there would always be that first breath, that primal place of connection. Now, who will know me in the same way? Who will allow me to disagree and continue to love me? Perhaps more importantly, I am adult and why is it important or necessary?

On Christmas Eve day that year, a mere five days after the funeral, I called my daughter in New York and was clearly not my usual self. Her words still echo as if she had just spoken them, “Get over it, just get over it.” How do you get over “it?” I hope Joan has some answers in her book. So far her writing has encouraged me to allow the irrational self some acceptance and not rush the getting over part. I am not upset with my daughter for saying it; I am upset with me for not understanding it. When I heard those words I knew death had changed our entire world for I would not ever be the woman I was before. My daughters would have to catch up for not only had they lost their Grandmother who they loved deeply, but their mother was not at home either.

Mother’s day is next weekend and this is the fifth Mother’s day without her. The lilacs still bloom and I still cry when I catch their scent. It is my mother. My daughters and I do not speak of that cold December we prefer to talk about “Grandma” and all that she gave us including those moments of rigidity that nothing could bend. I am on a quest to understand myself that first year and when I do my daughters will know. Unlike then, today they always seem to know and I have stopped wondering about it. I sense it goes back to that first breath and I was there and that connection is primal.

Neighbors

They had three boys under the age of seven. Their mini van had New Mexico plates which were never changed to the Grand Canyon state. They arrived in early October, just weeks before Halloween. I first noticed the New Mexico plates as I just moved here a year ago from the Land of Enchantment and missed it terribly. It felt a little more like home to have neighbors who had breathed the same air. The second was definitely the children. There were virtually no children in the apartment complex and it was so wonderful to hear the sounds of small voices again. And a new brother or sister was definitely on the way. I knew when they moved in, I would have to buy Halloween candy this year.

Apartment complexes are a little like airports and train stations. They are not built for permanence. The pulse is one of comings and goings. A bridge between places. And as Marge Percy wrote in the 70's you cannot plant potatoes on a bridge. So in the last sixteen months I have seen many comings and goings and very little planting.

The young African American couple who lived in the apartment prior to the family had dreams of owning a home and moved on. They took with them what little diversity was present and of course, their cat, who used to sit in the window and watch the comings and goings. They also took their beautiful dark-skinned angels that graced their window sill. It was as if we were all blessed by them.

Then the new family arrived and I came to see that we shared more than having lived in the Land of Enchantment. We both loved Halloween -- little children dressed in their fantasy outfits experiencing the moment of magic when candy actually dropped into those little ghost-covered plastic bags. We were the only apartments whose occupants chose to carry heavy real live Christmas trees from tree lot to car, then from the garage -- not necessarily close to our door -- up two flights of stairs and into apartments a wee bit small for anything that stood six feet tall with branches encompassing more than half the dining room.

Tonight, it is silent outside my walkway and I am once again reminded that apartment complexes do not lend themselves to hellos and collective moments. We come and go as if these temporary homes were islands unto themselves. We don't congregate on our patios in hopes of catching sight of a familiar face or hearing a friendly voice. We live behind gates with multiple locks and we feel safer that way. We don't rely on one another for a cup of sugar, let alone a sense of community. It really does not surprise me that the family moved on. One can't put roots down here. There is no fertile ground on which to grow.

I don't know where the family went and I am especially sad that I won't know if it was a little brother or sister who will join them. I am sad to know there will be no more good mornings or Merry Christmas, or hear little voices tentatively saying, " Trick or Treat" at my door.

However, today is the vernal equinox, a time of new beginnings, a time of plantings. My patio garden is in full bloom rich in color -- purples, yellows, and deep reds. I live on the second story and the gray concrete patio floor is warm beneath my feet. The only soil is that which fills the window boxes and my pots. The kind you carry in. I just signed my lease for another year. I wonder who I will call neighbor and if they too, will bring their own soil.

The Urban Lanscape

It was a quiet morning with little distraction on the drive downtown to the heart of Phoenix where I work. I live in the land of Lexus, Porche, Audi, and the occasional Bentley. My car, sixteen years old, oxidized from the desert sun, purrs along with 330,000 plus miles. At first, I felt uneasy, as if I stood out and perhaps did not belong in this particular auto landscape. I sensed an "attitude." It actually was in the Trader Joe's parking lot that I first encountered the "attitude." A bleached blond in her Lexus convertible was going to cruise through a stop sign as I was invisible although almost half-way through the intersection. I hit the horn and she stopped. Her mouth open, incredulous, that I would not give way. I realized at that moment there was more to cars in the area where I live, than transportation.

I have moved here from off the grid. Living at 7,000 feet in the high mountain desert with only the sound of coyotes and the ravens to wake me in the morning and an occasional deer to bar my path out to the highway. I was not accustomed to the human element. I would so love to meet her on my old turf, but we all know that isn't going to happen as there is no one to "see" you out there, at least in the human form.

Today as I drove to my office six stories above downtown Phoenix, I encountered the complexity of the urban landscape. There was a silver Jaguar in front of me changing lanes at random and suddenly out of the driver's side window was tossed a plastic water bottle. I remember it as it was aimed at my car and rolled under my wheels. Somehow I never connected littering and Jaguars in the same breath. The water was of the fancy high-end variety I noticed as I watched it roll across the street in my rear view mirror.

I drive through many varied neighborhoods on my way to the downtown ASU campus. I prefer the surface streets as I feel more connected to my surroundings. At thirty-five to forty miles per hour, I can feel the streets beneath me and hear the varied noises of urban life. I become a part of the commute, not just someone passing through. A few minutes later, I was on a neatly lined street with medical buildings and churches and a community center, when I encountered two men and their shopping cart. I suspect it was filled with their life. Whatever treasures they keep were neatly wrapped and bundled. One man was carefully buttoning his shirt and making sure all was tucked in as they waited at the crosswalk. They stood there with dignity, heads held high and smiled gently at one another.

In the space of ten minutes on my morning commute, preconceptions were suddenly shattered. And as we all know, preconceptions can easily turn into prejudice if hardened over time. It can creep in unnoticed. I had no idea that I was using an economic barometer to judge my neighbors. I have chafed at being a part of this urban landscape since I arrived sixteen months ago, but I sense there are many more moments waiting for me to reflect upon. And as much as I hate to admit it, I sense I have much more to learn about the human spirit on my morning commute and in my foray into this new and unknown territory.

Time

Sunday morning in the high desert. It is quiet with only an occasional urban landscape sound filtering through the patio abloom with flowers. Today is the first day of daylight savings time. The Sun doesn't know that it is now one hour ahead of yesterday. It rises and sets as it always does. I like it that the Sun doesn't know how we try to manipulate its arc in the heavens. I fortunately live in a state that keeps its own time and I am grateful.

Time is such an illusive phenomena. Jeremy Rifkin wrote in the 80's that as members of the nano second culture we will be the first culture to have a time reference beneath our ability to perceive. Given that nano seconds equal 1 billionth of a second , makes sitting at a traffic light for 90 seconds seem like forever. When driving and I am often being cut off (usually by some big SUV that equates size with ownership) I am reminded that we do not know how to operate with such a time reference. Our reference to time is so fast, we cannot relate to the mundane with ease. We forget the basics of "space/time courtsey." How do we maneuver in traffic? How do we wait in line? Even online dating: connection to another takes only the click of the mouse, available 24/7. What happened to courtship and chance encounters?

I am not sure fast equates with anything other than fast. I know the time it takes the sun to set or rise has not changed. I know the tides ebb and flow with a rhythm that has been forever. So why is it that man wants to manipulate the hours of day light? Energy conservation -- that can happen by living "green." If you are serious, don't dabble with the sunlight, buy a hybrid, use solar energy, and build with eco-friendly materials. Think adobe. I am aware of the exceptions. Those living on the farthest reaches of our eastern seaboard, welcome it...but somehow that argument doesn't hold for the rest of the country.

I say honor time for what it is and that includes the nano-second culture. Enjoy the seasons and all that comes with it. Don't short change mother nature by the use of a clock. She has been around for a long time and she probably has a grip on what is in our best interests no matter what time man wants the clock to say.