A Long Day's Journey Into Night

    Its an odd time of year for me, perhaps because of the delayed but approaching winter, it being that twilight season.  Tomorrow is schedule to be 72F, all at a time when our mountains usually brace for snow.  And the trees are only now beginning to drop their leaves, cocky as if feeling that snow will take even longer to arrive.  This is when large branches break under the one-off early storm that surprises with heavy, wet snow which melts slowly, a sticky weight that clings until it takes the branches with it to the ground.  Eugene O'Neill wrote the title play above, one often hailed as one of the great age-old --or is that old age-- stories in the world of theater, that of tired muscles and crisp skin that add to those thoughts of being washed up, the free-flowing but cheap booze bringing what no plastic surgery can, a morphine cloud to blur what your eyes and brain so starkly show you.  Look at us, they cry like ghosts.  Look at us!  The Struts sang words about not wanting to look back and think of what could have been: Don't wanna live as an untold story; rather go out in a blaze of glory...Dodging bullets with your broken past...what a waste of blood and sweat...I wanna live better days.  Never look back and say it could have been me.  

      Some say a journal helps, tablet after tablet of yellowed pages to help you and any future readers become detectives long after your own story telling ability has departed.  Even for those memories still vividly recalled, the scribbles help to fill in the gaps, the leaks of the mind that seeped away like heat out into the chill of morning, those small spackles of patching that once made your life what it was, whole and fruitful even if you couldn't, or didn't want to, piece it together at the time.  That glitter that happened then was swept away with each wind as you aged, splinters of a hologram that some ancient library would never bother to store, the plankton of your life now just piled up with so many others, drying and adding to the bulk of a Sahara of history, impossible to sort or retrieve, as if anyone would want to.  The villages, the wars, the castles, the dinners, all having floated away into the cloud that will settle yet again, ready to be buried and built over, generation after generation, waiting for an archivist who you hope is coming.  But deep in your heart, you know that that is a myth.  Go back, go back, you of sweat and toil.  But there is no back.  You are already too forward.  

     Perhaps it was the John Oates memoir, he of Hall & Oates fame from the 80s.  60 million records sold, headliners at Live Aid back then, endless cash and fame and groupies, whatever they wanted it was there...extra cars, houses, parties (who knew they would remain the most successful pop duo of rock music?, or that a young Oates on a bitterly cold winter morning nestled in a diner for warmth, saw a wild lady walk in dressed only in a ballerina's tutu, chatted for hours with her and looked forward to seeing her again, then watched her leave...at 3 AM; She's Gone began to flow from that roller coaster emotional ride).  His was but one of many such celebrity lifestyles, and as with such "stars" back then such as Olivia Newton John, a collage of photos accompanied their books or videos: meeting the Queen, tens of thousands of fans seemingly ready to sacrifice all, waiting limos dropping you off at red-carpet events, the blurred pace of life going by until...it stops (despite 60 million records sold, Oates would later be told that he was broke).  For many, it had been a better life than one could have hoped, a better life than most could have achieved, and then came that look in the mirror or that visit to the doctor with test results.  Why me, they asked?  And as my surgeon friend used to tell a few of his patients, why not you?  The good or bad or middle or later life can hit anyone as easily as snow falling.  But my friends and I looked at that mirror and thought of only one thing, which was how fortunate we all were to have gotten this far and to have had the lives we've had.  We may have all been poor in childhood, but we didn't know that (kudos to our parents who struggled to keep our eyes looking elsewhere); and we had each made it through the hormonal teen years and macheted our way into adulthood, found jobs, muddled our way through relationships, avoided (for the most part) regretful decisions, and somehow decades later, emerged into this older form of us, still walking and talking and reading, and more importantly, knowing just where we were.  No going back.  But none of us wanted to...and that was the big reveal.  We had reached the point where it had indeed been a long journey, but what a fortunate and fascinating one, a trip --just like those rock and Hollywood stars-- which we could never have predicted.  Lucky us.  And that was the other reflection, that we were aware that we had indeed been lucky, especially when so many others have ended up in Gaza or Sudan, or are now struggling for food and health care here in the U.S. because of a few boys plsying political ping pong.

     It's each of us, really, differing in how we look back at our lives as we age.   Stephanie Danler expressed her changing view in Traveler when she returned a decade later to again trek Mont Blanc in the Alps: ...I thought about Mont Blanc's many expressions: demure, arresting, welcoming, severe.  I hadn't expected the thrill of circling her or the intimacy of returning to that first view -- carrying a muddier, looser version of myself.  The shape of my life has changed so drastically that there are days I hardly recognize myself, but there are others when I suspect that this woman was exactly who I was asked to become when I walked through Spain a decade ago.  The Camino de Santiago is a straight line.  You arrive one way; you leave another.  The Tour du Mont Blanc isn't a pilgrimage.  It offers no final absolution.  It is a loop but not a closed one: a circle whose center shifts at every step, a mountain with a thousand faces, each one reflecting whatever you are carrying with you when you look up.  A ghostly memory or time of day...

      For some reason the subject of ghosts and apparitions have been coming up a lot recently.  Not the (in my opinion) schlocky Harlen Coben rehashed version of "I see dead people" series, Lazarus (a review on Yahoo added: ...you start to realize this high concept crime psychological drama is just not clever enough to pull off the high-wire act it set for itself to bring all of its different strands together.) but more the battling of forces tied to culture and belief.  Here's how Ramona Emerson put it in her recent book, Exposure: Gallup is unforgiving in the winters.  Sometimes as I watch them die, I wonder about their families.  If there is someone at home wondering where they are.  There could be a child out there in the darkness watching the door, waiting for the familiar return of their father, or their mother.  Instead, they are on the streets.  That kid of theirs will be waiting the rest of their lives.  At least I was lucky enough to know that my parents weren't coming back from what happened to them.  I was on my own... In my mind I could feel the cold of that night when I took Father Saren to hell.  The water seeped into my body and into my clothes like hate...Then I saw it.  The old scythe was strangely preserved, with only small hints of rust along the edges of the blade and at the points where the steel met the etched wooden handle.  I picked it up, finding it smaller now in my older hands.  The blade smelled of iron, of blood, of a million lies.  It had called me there for a reason... It had been years since anything had called me as loudly as this blade.  I held it, feeling its weight and its consequences.  I put it into my pocket, knowing that this was all leading me to where I was meant to be...This story has been told before, the battle of good and evil, of angels and demons, of gods and humans.  Humanity doesn't learn, or care, about the inequities of heaven.  I am still tethered to the messengers that God continues to send...I am NOT a soulless man. This is what I fear people will not understand.  This was how author of the bestseller Shutter imagined the mind of a killer, one who was molested as an orphan by a priest and was now discovering that his calling had come early but was not the calling he had expected.  Sometimes life isn't measured in one's years but in the direction and path one chooses, voluntarily or not.  And sometimes life steers us directly into darkness, a different take on the song by The Struts, as if to truly say "that could have been me."  Whether you've never had to work because of your daddy's name (think Kardashian or Murdoch) or had to work all your life just hoping for a good outcome (pretty much the rest of us), life is a continual push.

     Enter the established writing of Susan Orlean in a reluctant memoir, so said because she admits that she didn't really want to write such a book.  But this recent book differed because it provides a peek into the mind of a writer, or hers at least: The process of a journey, of striving for something that offers a sense of belonging and contentment, of traversing the wild mystery of the unknown to arrive at the known, is what it means to be alive.  Writing is a recapitulation of that experience.  Writing documents the process of traveling from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end.  Even writing that doesn't seem to be about a journey is at its heart a narrative of the writer's voyage into a new world and toward a grasp of it and then onward to describe the people and places around me, particularly the ones that were least likely to be noticed.  The nooks and crannies of the world, the odd and original shape of people's lives, the passion that we bring to those things that matter to us --the way we try to make our lives make sense and the way we struggle to fit ourselves into the world, the unlikely alignments of disparate elements bounced together by accident or magic-- these are the subjects that fascinate me and seem important to understand and illuminate.  Writing is a job, but for me it has always seemed like a mission.  I felt called.  I really did, to describe ordinary life in a way that revealed its complexity and poetry -- to show how rewarding it is to be open to and curious about the world, and how much joy can be found in letting yourself be surprised.  I wanted to draw readers in and convince them to appreciate these stories, especially ones they might think they'd care about or find interesting.  Perhaps they would begin to look at the world in a different way, one that was full of curiosity and welcome.

     But those ghosts.  The new book by Mizuki Tsujimuro, (Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon) introduced the idea of a "go-between," people who could "connect" you with that other world, the world of those who have passed.  The time spent together would be from about 7 at night until the sun began to rise the next morning, and the contact for both would be someone you could touch and hold and talk with and ask questions.  But here was the catch...you, the living, would have one and only one chance.  And the dead person being asked could deny your request.  So it got my wife and I talking...who would we ask?  And more importantly, would that person accept?  My wife chose her mother, who would almost certainly accept; but I felt pulled toward my brother, even if he would likely turn me down in favor of seeing his daughter or his wife once again.  But I posed the same question to two of my friends, one of whom answered that he would choose his dog, the other friend choosing his cat.  "If I could have my cat just sit in my lap again for another 10 or so hours, I'd be happy," he told me.

     "It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time" wrote Virginia Roberts Giuffre in her book, Nobody's Girl.  Her story, despite multiple efforts to have it suppressed by "influential" politicians, CEOs, and royal family members, tells of her surviving abuse from Jeffrey Epstein and countless others, including her stepfather and allegedly, her husband (the charges were in court at the time of her somewhat questionable suicide): My ears are ringing.  As I stand here, my rational mind knows that they cannot hurt me anymore, a year after Epstein's lifeless body was found in his cell, Maxwell was arrested, and at this moment, in 2021, she remains in jail awaiting trial on various charges, including sex trafficking a minor [note: Trump has moved Maxwell to a "cushy" prison and is considering her pardon].  Yet still I feel haunted by their ghosts...Trauma is such a cunning enemy.  Those of us who've survived its terrors often marvel at how quickly it can recede, at least at first.  Once you get to safety, your visible wounds --your cuts, your bruises-- heal and fade.  Your psyche, too, revives, like a drowning man who, pulled from the depths, somehow spits up dark water and opens his eyes.  But recovering victims like me know too well how trauma lurks in the shadows, always there.  No matter how many years go by, or how many therapists you see, it can rise, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere...Was the abuse I suffered merely the result of bad luck?  Had my family's shameful secrets marked me for tragedy?  Or is there something going on in our culture that contributed to my bad situation?...I won't let the demons win.

     Then this on headaches, ones which --as with the Epstein files-- just don't seem to go away.  It was a review of the book by Tom Zeller, Jr. in The New Yorker, which talked of an aura, something Merriam-Webster defined as "a distinctive quality or atmosphere that seems to surround someone or something."  Wrote the reviewer:  Aura is one of the most striking features of a migraine, but only about a third of sufferers experience it...there’s a kind of flashing light in the shape of a crescent moon with saw-like teeth, and this apparition gradually expands until it blocks the vision in my right eye...Zeller, a science journalist, does not get migraines.  He suffers from something generally acknowledged to be even worse: cluster headaches.  Often featuring in lists of the most painful conditions in medicine—along with trigeminal neuralgia, sciatica, and gout—cluster headaches are named for the way that they descend in clusters, several times a day.  The intensity of the pain is reflected in another name for the condition: suicide headache.  Zeller describes the pain as “white-hot, blinding but invisible, frantic but elephantine” and writes of “writhing on the bathroom floor; of spittle and drool; of fingertips ground furiously into the scalp in a futile attempt to soothe whatever shrieking complex of anatomy is tearing at the right side of my head.”...Reading Zeller’s book, I was reminded that there is a kind of uneasy fellowship in this condition—a vast, involuntary community of people mapping out their lives between attacks, haunted by uncertainty but sustained in part by accounts like his.

     The cold arrived, not freezing cold but cold enough.  And with it came the winds, steady gusts strong enough to blow over heavy trash cans waiting in the street to be picked up.  And as if the leaves had held a secret meeting, down they came in batches, blending in with the litter and trash the wind was now blowing off into yards blocks and blocks away.  The winds lasted for over 20 hours.  And just like that, the skeletons of trees were there.  Gone was most of the color, most of the past.  Winter was now chomping at the bit and waiting to make its way in.  "Each of us contains an unimaginably rich world, a full universe of thoughts and knowledge and aspirations and reveries, of stories and memories and perceptions and emotions, that the sum of each person is an entire galaxy, unique and whole," added author Susan Orlean.  But not each person is free to explore and express and expand that.  Some have their lives cut short by those who should know better.  And some, like Virginia Roberts-Giuffre, break free even at the cost of life, defiant as the Struts in singing: I can't hear you, I don't fear you.  For some, death will bring the end of the ghosts; for others death may be just the start of them 

     Who can know if ghosts are real, whether in this life or later in an "after" life.  Maybe ghosts manifest themselves now in our dreams, or maybe in our headaches.  Maybe as author Emerson wrote, they await an opening to come in; or maybe they are just waiting until death arrives and there is no way to avoid them.  The winds we experienced weren't strong enough to blow away such ghosts, but they finished off what few Halloween decorations had remained.  It was fitting in a way, my friends and I feeling so very fortunate to have come as far as we have, to be old enough TO look back and to feel that we have been far luckier than most.  Our lives have been a collage of experiences, a mixed salad of life with only a few bitter pieces but for the most part, something quite enjoyable.  And it was appropriate with this changing weather, this go-between of seasons before Frosty arrives, that we should think not of the now-gone ghosts and spooky spirits of Halloween, but rather to ponder a time of gratitude.  Thanksgiving, was right around the corner...and nature was still showing us her bounty of colors.   

Addendum:  I have to throw in my pitch for the old film, An American Werewolf in London.  What looks cheesy now was unique in its satirical take of an ordinary student realizing that he's somehow been on a killing spree, something he discovers when his bloodied and torn-to-pieces (but dead) victims confront him in all sorts of places, one being a movie theater where they openly tell him with little to no malice, "Jack, look at what you've done to us."  Even back then, it made me wonder what I would do if faced with such voices and visions, real or imagined.  The film was directed by John Landis, who would later co-direct the Michael Jackson video for Thriller...