Returning Home

Painting by Ecuadorian artist, Oswaldo Guayasamin

      At the end of any vacation there is nothing like the end.  If it's been a long vacation, say two weeks or (tortuously) even more, then the time to head home begins to look brighter and brighter.  Clean clothes, your own bed, seeing your animals, all that good stuff.  Certainly there'd be a lot of cleaning up and catching up and paying bills, all the bad stuff.  But you'd be home.  Home.  So all that said, it was finally my turn and, as fate would have it, I would have to work for that luxury.  Back to a middle seat, back to an all-nighter, back to not being able to sleep despite everyone else locked in contorted poses and yes, sound asleep.  Back to a tired, fuzzy head trying to make sense of how many more times could I do this?  Where were all the afternoon flights, the ones that had 2-3-2 seating?  What's with the perpetual 3-3 seating down single aisles with rows that seemed to stretch into somewhere past the horizon once you boarded (44E...really?)  And how did everyone else get those windows and aisle seats?  I mean, I've flown a little, and spent what I felt was my share of dollars, so did middle seats always seem to be the only seats left, and always on an all-nighter?  Perhaps it was my penance for having such a wonderful time, that yin and yang of the universe where balance had to be restored.  And who was I to complain?  There were lots of others in middle seats, likely equally miserable, equally tired, equally trapped with thoughts of "what did I do to deserve this?"  So, with the gods of karma having fulfilled their roles, it was time to conclude this Homer-like odyssey.  But as my friend noted, all first-world complaints.  I should be (and am) embarrassed...

Detail of same painting by Guayasamin

      So to end this longer-than-expected vacation saga of a small peek at two South American countries --and to those of you who have yet to go to such lands-- I offer just one piece of advice...do it now.  It is all worth it, middle seats and all-nighters included (I will likely never hear the "you've been upgraded" call by the gate agent since i don't have frequent flyer accounts*).  As I wrote to some of my younger gen-z friends (Gen-Z are those 25 and younger, and yes, I actually know a few of those infants): You youngsters, get out and see the world NOW.  Us oldies need you to see LIFE and the joy of people, even if their incomes are far lower than any of us (and living in conditions we would picture as poverty); but they seem to have something which we all need and strive for...passion.  It is evident everywhere, coupled with the understanding that we are seeing it --and not living it-- through our privileged tourists' eyes.  But it IS a distinction, one needed and obtained only by going to a distant foreign land.  So go NOW...scrimp and save but you'll gain something money can never buy.  Experience.  One young Danish lady I met at Machu Picchu early in the morning was as still as a statue, taking it all in, the reverence, the quiet, the spirituality.  She had climbed the mountain behind the site (not the more photographed baby mountain of Huayna Picchu but the actual Machu Picchu in back where all the sanctuary points align) and had --in her words-- gotten lost.  But she was more likely feeling found, just "lost" as if in heaven.  All of you, go get that, and get it while you're young.  It will be your guide, throughout and for your life...

Images of Posada's La Catrina, Day of the Dead

     Seeing ancient sites, and for me at least, seeing them with a guide, puts far more questions in your mind than just gazing at the physical wonder of it all.  Who, or what was the first to recognize the pattern of the stars, the regularity, the alignments?  Who could convince (or order) enough people to build massive mounds and temples and pyramids to convey those shadows?  And how could you walk away even today and not realize that what was accurate thousands of years ago is still accurate today?  So who or what instilled THAT curiosity, that questioning, that pattern recognition that gave them pause to just wonder about all those stars...stars so few of us ever see anymore?  Ah, the chicken or the egg?  Perhaps some of this questioning comes only as we age, or when a traumatic event puts us square in the face with our mortality.  Who knows.  The NY Times featured a book by midwife Leah Hazard titled Womb, The Inside Story of Where We All Began and it goes well beyond the simple wonder of life's beginning.  Wrote part of the review: With its colorful stories about the doctors and researchers whose work makes up what we know --or think we know-- about the uterus, the book drives home an often-overlooked truth about science: that it is the product of human labor.  Its foundational texts have been written by fallible and biased people, interpreted through the lens of existing social narratives, and applied in ways that map onto culturally specific preferences and aversions.  Whatever information we have about the uterus was not handed down from on high, but rather gleaned through the combined efforts of profit-motivated pharmaceutical executives, midwives experimenting with fungus and herbs, women who offered their bodies to scientific study, 19th-century male medics who were, Hazard says, “seeking to promote their own careers,” and others.  Often, their hypotheses were later proved wrong, their remedies debunked, their groundbreaking discoveries neglected.  Such is the nature of the work.  Just as with interpreting those ancient cultures and structures today, we are actually in our infancy, guessing as best we can.  

     As I've written before, the miracle of life is that we humans leave a world of liquid, one with our bodies cramped together in a tightly curled position and being nourished and kept warm.  A place of comfort.  And darkness.  And then, something grabs or pushes us out into a world of cold, a world of unfamiliar light, a world of oxygen.  Our lungs --the last organ to activate-- has to do so immediately or we will not survive; start too early and we drown, start too late and we asphyxiate.  It as if we move from a world without air and not really "knowing" if we have an organ that will kick in at the right moment and send us into another realm.  When the reverse happens, when everything begins to heave us unexpectedly into yet another realm, we call it death.  Some cultures call it life.  But just as a fetus cannot know what, if anything, is next, so it is with us being "alive" on this tiny dot in a tiny galaxy in what may prove to be a tiny universe.  But all of that is speculation.  Something I  discovered when listening to the new album by the now 82-year old Paul Simon.  The single-track, half hour "album" included these lyrics by Simon: Wait, I'm not ready.  I'm just packing my gear...my hand's steady, my mind is still clear...I want to believe in a dreamless transition.  Wait.  I don't want to be near my darkest intuition.  It's a far cry from the 25-year old John Lennon writing In My Life: There are places I'll remember all my life, though some have changed.  Some forever, not for better; some have gone and some remain.  All these places had their moments with lovers and friends, I still can recall.  Some are dead and some are living.  In my life, I've loved them all.

     This bit of reflection coalesced for me not only because of what I was reading and listening to, but for two other reasons: November 1st was not only my late-brother's birthday but it was also the traditional Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, an event so well depicted in the Pixar film, Coco.  The Mexican artist who is so famous for symbolizing the holiday, died broke and unknown, buried in a mass grave, which was in contrast to the late artist from Ecuador whose prints can now fetch $25,000 and more.  So judgement arrives quickly, but let me back up: Oswaldo Guayasamin donated much of his work while alive, always fighting to what he termed "crimes against humanity."  His series (his collection numbers over 10,000 pieces) had titles such as Trail of Tears, Age of Wrath, and later in his life, The Age of Tenderness.  How we remember people and how we reflect on our own life changes as we age, but does seem to accelerate are we near whatever we believe to be our "final" years, whatever that may be.

     Of course, much of our view of what is life and what is death is viewed from what society considers acceptable, those without what are deemed "mental health" issues.  Rachel Aviv, author of Stranger to Ourselves subtitled her book "unsettled minds and the stories that make us."  Anorexia, schizophrenia, xenophobia...as one put it in her opening jacket: ...sudden radiance and uncomfortable discontinuities that in the end force forward profound questions about what is real.  One study the author examined was an outcast in all measures: from school, from her family, from society in general, until the poorest of the poor began saw not her as depressed or mentally ill, but as a healer (...she refers to herself as a madwoman or a lunatic more than a dozen times in her journals, but only sometimes with despair, noted the author).  And when she died she left this note for her children: The garment we call 'this body' has come to one person as a child, to another as a wife, to another as a mother, to another as an enemy, and to some as a friend, and it perishes entirely.  Why be sad about it?  It's the fate of the world.  The author writes that after the mother died, the daughter then "went to another plane and another orbit," writing about in her own mental illness: ...there is a sense of loosely hanging together, not hanging together at all, of not owning your body or thoughts.  You lose a sense of being able to predict what you are about...In a modernizing world, devotion is not an acceptable emotion.  Devotion takes you to the bottomless pit, to the fact that I am getting here today but tomorrow I may not wake up.  That is terrifying, and it is close to madness.  But devotion can also help you feel a deep connection to this fact: that I didn't ask for this life, so whatever I have is a bonus.

     So before this gets too "heavy" or depressing or enlightening, here is what provoked some of this, a book titled Your Home Sweet Home, by Penelope S. Tzougrous.  In the book, she asked about the process of changing homes once you retire; should you move to a place to call your "final" home (my interpretation).  I had picked up this book because our current house has a lot of stairs, as in everywhere: to the porch, to the deck, to the bathroom, to the bedroom, even a steep driveway just to get to the garage (more stairs to enter the house from there).  And if my wife and I were to be realistic, this house (as familiar and as comfortable it may be) would not be practical if our health or hips or knees began to falter.  So the question the author asked readers to ask themselves was to just be honest and ask: go or stay.  Make a list, she advised.  Reasons to stay, reasons to go; the rest --finding a place, where to go at all, move to a home or a CCRC (the newest, and probably most expensive, trend), getting rid of your "stuff"-- all of that was supplemental to the basic question.  In some ways, that same question could be parlayed onto many subjects: relationships, jobs, even life at some point.  And once "gone," what then?  '

     Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell, on losing her best friend while in her 40s, wrote: It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it.  Edits, rewrites, the blur and epiphany of one-way dialogue.  Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part -- time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection...my one unbearable dream is the one is which she [the friend she lost] is sick and in treatment and I cannot find her.  We have lost touch, or a phone has been disconnected, or my key breaks off in a locked door with her on the other side.  There are many variations on this dream, the one from which I wake up clawing at space, but the message is unchanged:  Life, not death, has intervened.

     So before I end, here is what else is leaving, two movies worth watching: Summerland, and The Railway Man (both movies disappear from Netflix within the week).  The first deals with a scholar of sorts, trying to piece together myth and reality, stories told of "summerland" being a place some people go when they die.  For the living, some can see this realm, but most can't.  Throw in a series of twists to the story and you have a tale of hope and vision told from both young and old.  The second film is simply powerful...no other words.  Starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, it tells the true story of a period so few of us know, that of British POWs being forced to build a railway down the Mae Klong river (in one largely-fictional movie portrayal of the 50s, it was called the River Kwai).  It is a tale of forgiveness, and one which will (in my opinion) help you understand the traumas so many hold inside for years, perhaps taking it to their graves.  Some of us don't have to return from war or something that horrific; sometimes a simple decision can eat away at us.  When Laura Schroff walked down a street in New York she heard this from an 11-year old.  "Excuse me lady.  Do you have any spare change?  I am hungry."  As she wrote in her book: I kept walking.  There were lots of homeless people on the streets in New York City in the 1980s, and it was easy to just keep my head down and ignore them.  But as I walked away from the boy, something clicked in my head.  It was his words, his simple declaration to me.  "I am hungry."  I stopped in the middle of Broadway, turned around, and went back to the boy, whose name was Maurice Mazyck.  I offered to buy him lunch at a McDonald's around the corner, and I asked if I could join him.  I soon learned he hadn't eaten anything in two days.  That was our first meal together...but not our last...Maurice and I became friends, and that friendship is stll going strong today, exactly 30 years later.

     At this time of year, when wars rage and women and children are being killed, when emotions run high and understanding begins to falter, when we celebrate the ghosts of Halloween and then our ancestors on the Day of the Dead, perhaps even when we make the decision to simply walk away, we may be wise to take in the words of Eric Lomax (his book about his POW experience led to the making of the movie above): It is time for the hating to stop.

To my late brother: Happy Birthday

*Frequent flier points?  Well, not quite true since my friends (all four of them got upgraded) have those credit cards that earn miles (and they do fly more than me)...not us (we locked our credit over 10 years ago so "unlocking" it to apply for a card is way more of a hassle than garnishing a few points).  That said, Delta does allow you to apply for an account without attaching it to one of their credit cards, which I did.  Over a month later, I've yet to hear from them.