Just arrived in Phoenix and decided to spend the night here.
It's a little sad leaving new (to me) places and friends; it's also good to go home, to my own house and San Antonio friends and family. My robotic GPS voice tells me I still have well over 900 miles to go--which I should be able to do by Thursday night if I don't dawdle.
Interstate10 is less interesting than 40 was: not close enough to Sedona to be tempted to return, no trains yet. After last night's happy send-off party and farewell to Rone and family, it took me two hours to get through Los Angeles traffic. "Traffic detected ahead," Our Lady said, routing me through a maze of streets in the city, finally landing me back on the main highway, then back to Interstate 10, which will take me all the way home.
I've been thinking today about conversation: specifically the ones I'm having with myself and the ones I'm having with those of you who are following this blog. I've listened to several podcasts of "On Being" with Krista Tippett: interviews with writers, artists, scientists, and theologians in various traditions. She's such a great interviewer that it's been like eavesdropping on conversations--with Kevin Kling, Christian Wiman, the Dalai Lama's translator, Marie Howe and others.
Check out this site: Onbeing.org.
Kevin Kling--a writer and humorist--was born with a deformed left arm, and his right arm is paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. He talked about losses: of broken hearts, lost limbs, losses of persons. Krista brought up another loss: the incremental losses that come with aging.
"We can never get back what we've lost," he said, "But we can heal. We can even fall in love again after a heart break, but it's not the same heart that loves again."
He has such a sense of humor--even about his own losses--that it's inspiring to listen to him as he looks at the ways his condition has been part of his way of being in the world. "If you're able-bodied," he says, "It's a temporary condition." And this: "Wisdom isn't cheap.We have to pay for it."
Car reverie in the desert evoked made me think about people who are no longer here. Losses seem to go underground for long stretches, but then we hear or see something that brings that person back....
A year ago, I was receiving daily emails from my dear friend Gary who would die in November. He was never self-pitying as he saw the end coming. He described the deer, the painted buntings (that looked like a child colored them with crayons), and he told me about his piano gigs. He played several gigs a week at nursing homes, and even those with impaired memories would revive when he played Forties love songs. You could almost imagine their faces at twenty, dancing, in love again.
When I visited him the last time, he asked me from his hospice bed to go up to his study and get a CD of his music. I remember standing there in his study lined with books and CDs, thinking: this is one of the places he was alive and present; this is the place where he sat and wrote e-mails that were like poems; he won't ever be in this room again.
Today, I was listening to him play as I drove across California and Arizona desert. When I showed up to listen (which I now wish I'd have done way more than I did), he always played, "Georgia on My Mind" for me. Today when I heard that one, I had to pull off the road for a few minutes.
One of his last emails to me ended this way: "I don't know what to say. I've never died before."
Just before leaving San Antonio, I got my last New Yorker. He'd been subscribing to the magazine for me for the past four years. On the cover was a girl sitting on a rock at the beach.
In the ways we try to keep the people we love alive, I had taken that as his message for starting this trip: go to the water, go to the rocks. I realized yesterday that I'd not done one thing I meant to do: to have a picture of myself taken sitting on the rocks by the Pacific, so I approached a sun-burned stranger in a bikini and asked her to take this shot, for me, for Gary.
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