It is a bright and shiny new year. And today for your reading pleasure, allow me to offer you The Mule Killer by Antonios Maltezos.
It is quite cold in my house as we wait for the snow to begin falling. So cold that my hands are having a hard time typing this message. I need fingerless gloves and a quill and a candle dripping wax.
We are quiet on New Year’s Eve. If we get together with friends, it’s usually just a small gathering. But tonight, it’s just the two of us. Last year we were asleep well before the clock struck twelve.
When we were children, my sisters and I would play Monopoly on New Year’s Eve and listen to the top album count down, our cheeks red and burning from the cold of the day’s skiing. Sometimes we would go out into the cold night and toboggan down a long icy driveway, or a hill leading to a lake. It was thrilling!
But now, eight hours before the new year comes to my home, I am cold and quiet and looking for a warm corner and book to read and so I will wish you a happy new year in your home. May it be filled with peace, love, and enlightment.
The MFA Boston was packed to the rafters yesterday and while crowds displease me, this one made me sort of happy. I’m delighted to see that there are so many people out and about to look at art–and Friday isn’t even the free day!
So we went to see the Ansel Adams before it closes. I enjoyed the older photos and was taken with this photo of Georgia O’Keefe with their guide in Canyon de Chelly (a place I have not visited and should have). And though I had seen copies of it before, Aspens, Northern New Mexico brought me to tears.
But the most fun we had yesterday was when we wandered around after the visit. Allen really wanted to go to the Himalayan room and I’m glad we did becasue there we found the Tibetan sculpture Vajrabhairava and Consort, which is not only anatomically correct, but the two pieces can be detached from each other.
Reading more on Vajrabhairava, here is what I find:
Vajrabhairava is a wrathful manifestation of Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. His is the enduring, adamantine wisdom of ultimate reality which triumphs over suffering and death. He is known also as Yamantaka because he is the conqueror of Yama, the Lord of Death, who appears with the face of a buffalo. Of Vajrabhairava’s nine heads, the central one is that of the buffalo, symbolic of his defeat over Yama. The top-most head is that of Manjusri himself. Because of his manifold power Vajrabhairava was called upon to oppose all enemies of the doctrine, to keep the uninitiated away from the tantras.
A couple of days ago, my dear friend Ellen directed me to an astrology site where I could put in my sign and that of my partner and see if we were a match–and it turns out that we are. But I did not need this site to tell me (though it was reassuring that it did) that he is the love of my life, as this is the one thing that I know for sure.
The other sign that the site thought would match up with was Pisces. And when I read that, I thought, Yes. Of course. That makes sense because Mum was a Pisces. And she was the other love of my life.
Of course, these loves are different: one romantic and the other the love of mother for child, child for mother and then some. I would have killed for my mother. Indeed, had my stepfather not died when I was sixteen–when the hatred within him manifested itself into a killing disease–I would likely have ended up killing him. In fact, for many years I feared that I might have done just that–I was anguished over the memory that when I heard his diagnosis, that I prayed it would kill him.
And so I felt my words, my prayers, had killed for her. And this is who I am: I will love you fiercely or I will not love you at all.
All this is to say that when my mother died five years ago in April after a short fight with lung cancer, I fell the fuck apart. I had been falling the whole time she was sick but when she was gone, so was I. And I could not breathe.
At work, a job I had loved, I felt burdened. People’s problems irritated me. On my first day back after the funeral, a friend broke down in tears over lunch because she felt fat. I wanted to slap her. Do you not understand that my beloved is gone?
And then a few weeks later when I stood in front of the large group (of around 50) of people I had worked most closely with and tried to speak to them about something to do with our work and the future, I lost control. It was my first time ever with stage fright. My throat closed. I could not look at eyes. The room seemed hot.
I was humiliated, broken. I felt weak, when everyone else was strong. Look at that fellow whose wife is dying. He can hold it together, why can’t I?
So we said: We’ll quit our jobs. We’ll travel the country. We will pretend that there is no tomorrow.
And when I told people, some worried about me, questioned my decision, wanted to make sure I was okay: Are you sick? Are you dying? Do you have an incurable disease and you’re not telling us?
I wanted to say: Yes, I am sick. Yes, I am dying. Yes, I have an incurable disease. But they would not have understood that this disease was grief.
A few weeks before I left, when I might have still changed my mind, a fellow whose father had died right around the same time my mother did, took me aside in a conference room to talk. He told me about how he had always found comfort in work. How it’s what his dad would have wanted. Something like that. At the time I hadn’t thought much of it but in retrospect I wondered if I was being judged.
Here I was making a spectacle of myself. I should have been able to buck up. I should have soldiered on. Thrown myself into work. I should have not made people know that I was feeling this way. The truth was that I had already judged myself in this way. I felt I was being weak.
My mother was not the first death I’d known, after all. My father when I was ten. My grandmother. My stepfather. Aunts, uncles, a young cousin from a brain tumor. Young friends here and there. Old friends. Men I might have loved. Men I might have hated.
She was not my first death, but she was the one I loved the most.
And when we left we headed west. I wanted to be in the rockies, the sierra. I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon. And we saw these landscapes that Ansel Adams shows you so spectacularly through his work. Fitting then, to see his photos again yesterday. To be stirred once again by those same emotions: elation, joy at the beauty of this world, and desperation in my search. I was looking for my mother.
And where I found her was in Death Valley. At Badwater–the lowest spot in the Eastern Hemisphere. There I walked out on the salt flat in the heat of the day and felt for the first time that she was truly gone.
Amen.
This October was a sad month, with two deaths in the family–one expected and one unexpected one, both leaving me bereft. Leaving me once again with that hole–that desire to search, to find a reason, a meaning. And that clinging fear.
I have thought about death–my own, that of someone I love–nearly every day of my life since my father died. It has been my own constant companion. And it is the fear of grief–the gaping hole–that keeps it near by.
But I will tell you this: when I was reading The Year of Magical Thinking, it was perhaps the only time I have felt entirely normal in the past five years.
I am not different or sick or hysterical because someone I love has died and I have been grieving; I am human.
I have only a few things to say:
* Went to see the Ansel Adams exhibit today at the MFA in Boston. It was packed out with many people who wanted to be there but who didn’t actually want to see. I felt frustrated–like in the Louvre when everyone is crowded around the eensy Mona Lisa. She’s so small and delicate, after all. Give her some air. Let her breath. SEveral times I felt my throat seize. Felt the urge to stand in the middle of the room and scream something like, “SHUT UP! No one cares if you have climbed Mt. Washington!”
* I finished “The Year of Magical Thinking” today (would have read it in its entirety yesterday but life got in the way)–am mentioning this because it happens to be Dec. 30, which is the anniversary of John Gregory Dunne’s death. This book has left me skinless. My emotions are live and jumping on my skeleton (even more so than normal). Just ask poor Allen Dean who drove me to Boston today. Wath out for that car! There are cars on this highway! Watch out for THEM!
You will not want to miss Katie Weekley‘s latest column–Treacle Bliss–at Moondance.
Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona, a moving short story collection by Ryan Harty, follows the lives of those on the outside of emotion. The protagonists of these stories observe passively as those around them implode or explode, while the protags register a reaction, remove themselves from the fray, self-protect, realign, contain the moment for posterity.
It is this passivity that draws me into the stories, that allows me to be a part of them, to observe as well, to be moved and yet remain untarnished. These stories can make me sad but I will not be destroyed by them–just as the protagonist comes out on the other side, so do I.
Indeed, there is something of a sentimental twist at the end of many of these stories, which at first I found disquieting but then I came to expect as I found it left me feeling elated–almost triumphant–as if I, too, had escaped my past and managed to find my way out of the dark or out of the bright, hot sun of Arizona, where life should be happy, but it is not.
It is this ability to retain hope when all seems lost, which pleases me.
Take the end of Don’t Call it Christmas, for example:
Driving west on Toneleo Road, he passed a few car lots and fast-food restaurants; then the suburbs gave way to red-earthed desert and cacti. Everything suddenly looked so odd it was hard to believe it had looked normal at one time, and that made him feel better. It was almost possible to imagine a time when the last several days might seem strange and far away, too, when he might look back on them with a kind of detached wonder. But he didn’t want to let them pass too quickly. There was a pleasure to what he felt, along with the pain, and he understood that to let it go would be to suggest the worst of life – that it was transitory and random, and quick to forget.
The protagonist is on the verge of detachment and yet remains in the moment: he has not given up hope even though he suspects he should. And as a reader, I come along with him on this ride and look forward to the future. I once again have faith.
It’s a wonderful collection. I recommend it highly.
p.s. you can also find another of my favorite stories from the collection online: Ongchoma–read it, please. You will not regret it.
At some point last week I had a dream about two coyotes in my backyard. My dog was on his run and nosing around in the snow as he is wont to do. And I was looking out the window at him, worrying for some reason. And then these two animals–the coyotes–came tearing through the yard past Darby. And he started barking like mad and trying to get off his leash.
I banged on the window and yelled at him to stop and come here. I could not get to him.
The coyotes ran by again and I noticed that they were larger than they should be–my non-dream mind told my dream mind that these were not coyotes but wolves. My dream mind insisted on recognizing them as coyotes.
This sort of thing happened to me again this past weekend when I was having a dream in which I was trying to scream. It was a sort of dream within a dream in which my non-dream mind said, “You are dreaming within this dream and trying to scream” and this time my dream mind said, “Yes. I am dreaming within a dream about trying to scream, about trying to scream within a dream.”
Basically, I was holding a mirror up to a mirror and contemplating eternity.
This is what “the holidays” does to me.
Got my contributor’s copy of Staccato Magazine — a collection of micro-fiction in the mail yesterday and was delighted because my pals Kathy Fish and Randall Brown are contributors to this issue as well.
Here are some blogs I’ve just recently discovered and have been really enjoying:
The amazing Susan DiPlacido‘s novelTrattoria (which if you have not yet read it, READ it, damn it!) has been nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award. Congratulations, Susan!
All good things must come to an end. So too the orange rum cake with bitter chocolate glaze. This is the cake plate after we finished Christmas dinner (there were still two pieces remaining but they barely made it out alive). And so, as you can tell from its decimated remains on the platter, the cake was a huge hit! Everyone had seconds and people might have had thirds were we not so full from dinner.
The cake sliced easily and, though I feared it would be mushy since I had so soaked it in rum, it was firm (and potent) beneath the glaze.
Although it was tasty as is, next time I make this cake, here’s what I’ll do differently: add more orange zest to the mix and use Cointreau instead of rum in the glaze.
myfanwy collins 
