THE ALL PROMISED CYCLICAL NATURE OF MATURITY AND INNOCENCE

THE PROSE VERSION OF THE POEM

​

Innocence renewed

I tried to spare the details, to avoid too much information about those unpleasant bodily functions and fluids generally not described in polite company. But genteel avoidance proved too obscure. Almost certainly as the result of anniversary grief, stress, and exertion, a volume of blood, clotted and liquid, began to manifest in my urine in June, perfectly timed with the date of Lee's death. It was not the first time. Previous Junes had seen similar occurrences and all medical tests proved nothing. The mind is a powerful thing. I resisted returning to the doctor, but my friends would not have it. “Go to the doctor,” they demanded, reciting their own experiences of kidney failures and such. 

The blood persisted for three days, five days, a week, and on. There was no pain, only the dread of watching the blood and clots emerge consistently in terrifying spurts. Blood would leak out in the night, during sleep.

For two weeks, all sexual desire was extinguished, evaporated. I didn't even want to risk excitement. At the same time, as I walked through the quotidian routines of spring (also attributing the blood to annual allergies of the season), I found myself lifted into a sense of peacefulness. My own death was constantly a thought and possibility and, more, an inevitability to be accepted without complaint. 

I felt at peace, strangely. And I almost remembered what life was like in days of innocence. The world was new again, different. And I attributed my ability to see the world like this, at least in part, to the fact that I had been faithful, on and off, in my particular, specific practice of transcendental meditation for almost fifty – count 'em, fifty – years. 

After two weeks, the bleeding stopped. I'm going back to the doctor, reluctantly, for another test next week. I feel fine and never really stopped feeling fine. I dreamed last night about Lee. We had a baby daughter who started taking in complete sentences as I carried her. Lee knew of her ability like this and had failed to tell me. We fought. I woke up.

The poem I wrote concluded with my predictable and not exactly explainable philosophy of eternity and eternal life. At this very minute, I'm flying from Oakland to Chicago, writing on my phone with one finger, listening with headphones to showtunes, including Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly, and Lauren Ambrose in My Fair Lady, my head bobbing no doubt to the consternation of the guy in the middle seat.

And there you have it. The annotated poem. Probably nothing what you imagined, but in my other philosophy of life, whatever you imagined the poem was about is equally valid and maybe even more so. Words just have lives of their own. We don't control them.

THE POEM

Those two weeks when innocence stood at the door

Hauling an urgent, primal, necessary spurt of blood 

Everything holy and flushed away 

Mortality came greeting at the dawn, doling itself out in flesh reminders 

Wounds spilling yet free of pain 

Breathing glorious 

With air visible and sweet 

A clownfish aware of water for the first time 

A child again, returning after 60 years of small steps into wilderness 

After 50 years of meditation like the gray bearded man on the crag 

Or the seeker trekking up to sputter a worn query on the meaning 

Of everything, although, thighs and ankles aching 

He had picked it up along the way 

He already knew before opening his mouth 

The bluebird’s eggs were in the basket all along all the time 

Because of all those years sitting still morning and night  

The guru of intention and will came through  

Precisely as promised 

And so here we are all three all one and nobody home 

This is what it means to be saved 

Since the afterlife left yesterday

Tiptoeing out in the dark

June 30-July 2, 2019 

TIJUANA Y TECATE

"I've been married four times," Rafael, the bartender told me. "Now I'm back with my first wife."

We were the only ones in Diana's Bar in Tecate, Mexico. I was waiting to catch the afternoon bus back to Tijuana where I had been spending a couple of days, just exploring. I'd intended to visit the Tecate brewing plant, but I was misinformed about tours. They no longer give them.  Free beers, though, are handed out in the beer garden. 

I chewed on some rich carne asada tacos and nursed another Tecate. The conversation with Rafael grew increasingly confessional. He wasn't really happy in Mexico, he said. He had spent four years in the States, digging up potatoes in Idaho and working a cattle ranch in Wyoming. He never had papers or learned English.

Tecate waits just across the border from California, an easier crossing point than Tijuana. All Mexican border towns clearly are Mexican in character, but I've never warmed to them. Their proximity to the States casts a blurred reflection, as though the richness of Mexican culture and the expansiveness of the U.S. both were denied and barely out of reach.

Since the time I left Illinois for a couple of weeks to spend time with Henry and family, I had never been far from immersion in Spanish. In Los Angeles and Lynwood, signs may indicate "English Spoken" instead of the expected "Se Habla Español."

I took a Greyhound to Tijuana. Crossing the border over land was easier than by air in ways. You get off the bus, fill out the form, walk across the border and reboard the bus on the other side. There was no sign of turmoil or smugglers or caravans. Business as usual, people crossing in both directions.

Downtown Tijuana, Avenida Revolucion, is undeniably a tourist strip, with sombreros and painted donkeys  -- Mexican zebras -- chewing on corn husks and waiting for tourists to have their pictures taken.  I used Google maps to find a barber shop nearby and got my traditional Latin American haircut. I don't generally shop for souvenirs. I have no need to accumulate more t-shirts and tchotchkes, so I get a haircut instead.

I ate a tlayuda at an Oaxacan restaurant and then took an Uber to the apartment of my Couchsurfing hosts, Ignacio and his girlfriend Adele. He has offered a spare apartment next to his own to Couchsurfers for several years now. We went out for dinner that evening at Caesar's downtown, the upscale restaurant where the Caesar salad was first created. 

Ignacio makes a good living driving Uber in San Diego. We discussed our own experiences as Couchsurfing hosts. His only bad experiences were with indifferent backpackers who are looking for a free place to crash and offer little, even in the way of conversation, in return . In my case, the only poor experience was with a Chinese student coming to attend UI and suffering from nervous culture shock. But it all worked out. 

In the morning, Ignacio and Adele walked with me through the early street market, looking over the goods for sale and then stopping at Adele's favorite restaurant for some birria and crazy good mole and pollo tacos with peanut sauce and cinnamon coffee.

It wasn't my first time in Tijuana. Years ago, when the boys were still small, Lee and I drove through on our way to take the Copper Canyon train ride across northern Mexico. We also had eaten downtown. The restaurant menu was simple, offering a single order or a double order or a triple order.  But of what? An order of what?, I asked the waiter. He pointed to the stuffed goat heads on the wall. Goat meat birria is still prevalent here, prized and hefty chunks of meat swimming in delicious red broth. Topped with onions and cilantro, birria beats ayahuasca any day.

Earlier, back in Los Angeles, Henry and I drove downtown to the Mark Taper Forum to see Dianne Wiest performing as Winnie in Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days." LA has never been renowned as a big legit theater town, HBO's "Barry" to the contrary, and the audience at the Forum was California casual, not the same half tourist/half theater crowd you would get in Manhattan.  A fair number in the audience were simply not eager to see a known movie actor like Wiest delivering Beckett's existentialist monologue while buried in sand up up to her waist, and after an intermission that saw a number of patrons exit, buried up to her neck.

Still, it can be watched as a comedy, mostly, and people did respond with generous laughing, at the play and at themselves. I had to watch and reflect on the entire moment as if the bartender, the couchsurfing host, myself, Henry, and the whole messed up world were similarly stuck, a world in which we stuff hungry children in crowded, filthy cages and shrug it off on the way to dinner.

We can't go on like this and yet, we go on.