The Journal Keeper

by Phyllis Theroux

  Today was spent scrubbing and hosing down the side porch. Then in the later afternoon I discovered Eckhart Tolle in Sun magazine. Many of his ideas about time and living in the present mirror mine. Only children live in the present; only people with time on their hands see clearly. Thinking about how Ashland has changed me, it was here that my first prolonged period of daily ecstasy as an adult took place. I would wake up and smell the air flowing over my windowsill and notice the way the light caught the smallest hairs around a lilac leaf.

  Late yesterday afternoon, I sat alone on the back porch, listening to the soft buzz of insects in the warm air. My imagination traveled back to California when I was a teenage girl with all my life before me. The amber quiet, the smell of dry leaves and water, and the sharp particularity that was so much a part of that time when I automatically noticed everything—the grooves in the porch railing, the hairs of my own arm—are with me again.

  Nikki Hardin said last night on the phone that she felt invisible. Children feel that, too, but it seems like the natural state of things to a child. Then, once you lose the color and vividness of youth, you are invisible again. But it does give one the power to observe life without being seen, like a ghost.

  I spent time with an elderly friend of mine today. Her story, of being a World War II bride and then rising with her husband’s career, is so typical, and why shouldn’t it be? Every story is typical. We just don’t see it that way because we cannot rise one millimeter above the wave of events in which we are trapped, like a strand of seaweed, traveling alongside millions of other strands of seaweed, toward the same shore.

  Last night, sitting on my neighbor Dolo Kerr’s front porch, on her swing, was a wonderful way to end the day. Katherine Tinker came over for a while, to say that her dog, Jacob Morley, is dying. Then the town police pulled up in front of the apartment on the other side of the tracks. Dolo said this is frequent. There have been drug dealers and prostitutes living there. Meanwhile, we swing back and forth in the moonlight. The wisteria grabs the white wooden porch columns for support, the cat Lucy scratches the screen door, wanting to get outside. It’s not New York, although twice while we were talking a train that takes you to New York rolled by.

  I took an evening walk. The moon was up and the town took on a different, more solemn dimension, as if the night colors made it more solitary and mysterious. The smoker was on his corner, neatly dressed in black pants and a white short-sleeved shirt, the fingers of his right hand shoved into his pocket as they always are, the elbow of his left arm close to his side, like a towel rack that comes out from the waist and angles up, his fingers delicately pinching the end of his cigarette. I had given him a wife who wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, but I’m told that he lives alone and does nothing but read. The smoker is a slight man, perhaps 145 pounds, with pale pink skin and white hair. He seems alert but dreamy, his eyes fixed at some point straight ahead that is across the street from where he stands.

  On Saturday I spent quite a lot of time making things Mom wants to do possible. We went to the nursery and bought Katherine Tinker a pussy willow plant in memory of Jacob Morley, who had just died. After delivering it, the three of us spent the rest of the morning in Katherine’s tree house eating watermelon. Then, late at night before bedtime, we sat on our porch and I read to Mother from Hugh I’Anson Fausset’s autobiography, A Modern Prelude. Finally, holding an oil lamp in one hand to light the page, I read sonnets from an anthology of poetry. Mother didn’t know what a sonnet was and asked me if I had learned about them in school. As I was reading to her and explaining certain things, like the iambic pentameter rhyme scheme and the sonnet form, I felt my good fortune to be the one chosen to make her ready for the end of her earthly life. It is transforming me to be the one who is with her. The beauty of it came over me as I sat there and read from Shakespeare and Milton and Edna St. Vincent Millay. We ended with Milton’s “On His Blindness.”

  For several hours on Sunday I sorted through old letters, dating back to 1985, keeping only those written to or from family. It was not a pleasant experience, and by the end of it I wondered whether it wasn’t, at base, unnatural. So much pain and darkness hovered over the pile. The past is material for the present, but if we save it to justify ourselves or hurt others we weigh the present down. The past kills. Memories make wars, and a letter to or from an ex-spouse is a sharp knife, capable of inflicting great damage—upon one’s innocent children or oneself.

  After it was done and I hauled large garbage bags full of letters downstairs, I couldn’t help but think about the way the rest of nature vanishes without a trace when it is finished. Trees, snails, rivers—nothing leaves a record for its own sake. Everything dissolves back into the earth for future use, except humans.

  Was there anything worth saving? I don’t know, other than a few New Yorker jokes and newspaper photos that might be interesting later on. I was mildly surprised to realize how frequently my agent, Molly, wrote to me, and once, rather sternly, about my complaints about money. All in all, I felt as if I’d been walking across a killing field, and couldn’t get the stench out of my clothes.

  Is there a good reason to save my own letters as well as others? What, except a disinterested posterity, are they for? To know how one lived? I found that my cancelled checks from the 1970s came closer to the unwarped truth.

  Yesterday, I became a cell phone user. Again. This one can give callers my global position and collect my e-mail. It relieves Mother and estranges me. So much of my life is now online. Yesterday also marks the day I signed a contract with a local builder to remodel my garage.

  NOTES AFTER TRAVELING TO NEW YORK TO DO RESEARCH FOR THE BOOK ABOUT MY MOTHER

  One should never go too long without taking a trip. The eye and sensibilities need the shake-up, even if it is not pleasant, and there were moments in this trip that I felt very real and uncomfortable emotions, the kind I experienced as a growing child, with the same lack of context or perspective that makes feelings so difficult to bear.

  The impression I had of Mother’s birthplace in East Islip was twofold: beautiful and boring. The bright simplicity of the marshes and the bay, combined with the empty lives of her family and the mindless shooting at birds from duck blinds, canceled each other out.

  A conversation with Mother:

  MOTHER: The word journaling. Everybody’s saying that. Are you?

  ME: No way.

  MOTHER: Would you say that journaling is a new idiom?

  ME: No, it’s a new word. An idiom is an expression, like no way.”

  MOTHER: Thank you. I must learn these things before I go on.

  Jon Longaker’s funeral yesterday. There was a full church with all of Ashland in attendance. John McDowell’s sermon was his usual, enthusiastic, slightly tangled message, but he had cut short his vacation to be there. He was tremendously consoling to Jon’s widow, Lyde, and is by all accounts a kind and comforting pastor, so the church has flourished under his care.

  Church is like Noah’s Ark. They come in pairs and sit in the pews like they’re glued to each other. The price for being free—to come and go as I please—is to feel slightly unpopular in this setting. But my pleasure comes from enjoying the faces as they take their places in the pews and march back from communion. Like speed-reading a lot of books. It catches me up on the town.

  The quieter cycles of life are what fill me. The Reihl’s garden is finally exhausted, leaving only the crepe myrtles to pick. But at last, Conde Hopkins’s popcorn hydrangea bush has begun to bloom, and that will carry me over for at least two weeks. This house is very flower-dependent. What I love about Ashland is the abundance of them.

  This morning I am reading from Robert Ellsberg’s The Saints’ Guide to Happiness and it reminds me of the real road I am on, where, as Dag Hammarskjold wrote, one should not seek death “but seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.”

  Yesterday, Mother said she had something to say to me. “Come into my room and sit down.” (For such
a soft-spoken person, she can be quite dramatic.) “I woke up this morning,” she said, “and realized that I had already lived this day, so I don’t have to live it again. I don’t want to have any responsibilities, answer any phones, or see any people.”

  “So you want to go on a retreat?” I asked.

  “It’s more than a retreat,” she answered, but she didn’t elaborate.

  All day, she stayed quietly in her room. I respected her wishes and did not intrude. Then, around five o’clock, she emerged. As we sat on the screened porch with our drinks, I asked her how it had been. “I was in space,” she said, “and my mind was still the whole time. I could hear the birds and squirrels and I was present throughout, but even my body was silent.” For someone I see every day, she is always interesting.

  A few days later, Mother told me somewhat sheepishly that she had thought it was going to be the day of her death and she had wanted to be prepared.

  On the subject of death, my mother was both practical and eager. A notarized DO NOT RESUSCITATE order hung on the inside of her closet door. Her POWER OF ATTORNEY form was right behind it. And when a volunteer from the local rescue squad came around looking for a donation, she wanted to be assured that they carried morphine on their trucks before she wrote them out a check. Frequently, she began a sentence with “When I drop the old body …” or “After I’m gone …,” the latter usually tacked on to a request to make sure I put a towel down on the drainboard when I do the dishes or a reminder to get the screens replaced before they get any more ripped up.

  Most afternoons, she and Dorothy Jones took their walk in the local cemetery, which Mother realized was slightly bizarre. They were two old ladies staggering around a bunch of tomb-stones “like phantoms in drag,” she joked. But it didn’t faze her. “Wherever you go you’ve got the soil for the new if you want it,” she said. “Like the cemetery. If you put yourself right in it, you get to love it. The cemetery keeps you very aware of the present. You realize we’re all headed there. It’s just part of the game plan.”

  Game plan or not, I didn’t like the idea of her not being downstairs when I was upstairs. She knew it and one evening, while we were having our usual drink before dinner, the subject turned to what it would be like for me after she died. “You may not believe this, but after I’m gone I’ll be even closer to you than I am now. All the barriers will be dissolved.”

  I knew what she meant but could not bear to take the conversation any further.

  Visiting the Artiglias yesterday afternoon, I was immersed in little boys and tree frogs, cicadas, June bugs, and developing tadpoles caught in the Witt’s pond. Cody has brought back some algae tablets from the pet store; there is much searching for the dechlorinating drops. Everything in the house is about nature and the boys’ love and fascination with it. The house is topsy-turvy, but one feels very much at home there.

  Watering the plants yesterday afternoon, I was amazed to see how a spiderweb strung between a bush to the roofline survived the continued blast from my hose. The water simply blew through it, leaving the web unimpaired. How could this be?

  A call from a young friend who is struggling hard to find meaning in the breakup with her boyfriend. She asked me to pray for her and him. Always she includes him. She goes over how he phrased things, looking for hope. “He wouldn’t have said he wanted a separation if he really wanted to break up forever.” I felt duty-bound to say that in my experience men can be cowards. I wanted to tell her that she is young and will feel happy again, but you can’t jerk someone into the sunlight when grief is all they have left. We can see nothing with grief-struck eyes. This is what blind with grief means. Blind with love is the companion condition, when we see things that may not really be there either.

  The question could be asked: “How much of my life is now lived in the present?” Without having a precise way to measure, I would answer, “More.” More than when I had children around me and lovers to long for and was so pulled around by fear and desire. Now my life no longer revolves around things I cannot control.

  The long summer drought is a good metaphor for the value of putting down deep roots. The trees remain green for that reason. But the grasses have turned to toast. Finally, last night, after weeks of no rain, it came. This morning the streets are steaming with mist and the smell of moist earth.

  A twenty-four hour trip to Washington cheered my heart. The physical look of the capital, the lineaments of its “face,” are dear to me, like the actual faces of the friends I saw when I was there. I never wonder if my friends are looking forward with as much eagerness to seeing me. If I were to stop and ask, I would say no, that the larger pleasure is always mine.

  I am up extremely early—three-thirty or four— and Mother is in her room listening to Lawrence (on tape). Sometimes when I think about writing about her, I feel overwhelmed. The mother of the present is so rich that I do not want to do the introductions. Perhaps I should begin in the present and then drop back.

  Yesterday, before I left for Washington, I was in the kitchen and Mom was there, fussing about whether I had water to drink in the car, and so on. And then, out of the blue, she put her arms around me and said how much she loved me, how much she loved my spirit. It was very moving, and I drove up to Washington feeling cherished and warm.

  Reading Etty Hillesum’s diary [An Interrupted Life] is like returning to the heart of the matter. Only time, which is nothing, separates her from me. When I look at the photographs of her friends and marvel at the beauty and sensitivity in their faces, I feel as if I know them, which is how I feel generally about people. Standing on a street corner can feel like a class reunion.

  Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is enlightening, and enlightenment is his topic. I am creeping up on the meaning of that word and feel that it has a connection to the way one was as a child, in a state of continual reception, without judgment, only wonder. Perhaps this explains my desire, which is increasing, to sit and not write in my journal but simply to be. Yet turning off the thinking mind remains elusive. I am still on the horse, wandering around, glued to the saddle.

  It is important to set down on paper—so one can really look at them—what one’s deepest desires in life are. I continue to return to the desire for a large and loving heart. I would like that most of all. Then I desire to be more disciplined and fruitful.

  The first day of school after the summer: order, cool air, yellow school buses, children lined up for the new year of classes. All across the country the business of life resumes and I am calmed by it, given a sense of direction that it is summer’s purpose to dissolve. Soon there will be fires in the living room and color in the trees.

  My younger brother Peter flew from California to visit Mom for the first time since she moved here. She knew why he had come, to make sure he didn’t miss the chance to be with her before she died. My youngest brother, Tony, was scheduled to come later. “So, Peter, do you have any questions about me or your life that you want me to try to answer?” “No, Mom,” he said. “We’re square.”

  Peter’s visit has been all I had hoped it would be, and the surprise was his avid curiosity and delight in everything he saw and read. He devoured a book of Jefferson’s letters in a single night, stayed up to read the manuscript of Giovanni’s Light, and has gone through photo albums with Mother, asking questions. His way of thinking and expressing himself delights me.

  Peter’s last words as we drove him to the airport were, “You’re just what a big sister should be. You’ve got things under control.” There was not a single hitch in his visit all week, and the events seemed perfectly orchestrated, ending with the Burnt Taters at the coffeehouse last night. Before that, we had dinner with the Browns, Lemons, Artiglias, and others. It was a warm finish to a warm week and the mystery of Peter’s beginnings—as the solemn unsmiling child who didn’t think clowns were funny—is even deeper, given the sunny open-hearted person he is now.

  Fully alive. To be honest, open, and detached. This last is diff
icult. When I am angry, whatever pretensions to maturity I have are shredded. When I am ignored, it hurts my vanity. There are aspects of aging that no one is prepared for—and being marginalized is a significant one. No wonder old men father babies to keep themselves in the midst of things. Unless you are able to let go, to reinvent yourself and endure the pain of feeling your ego collapse around the truth, which is always changing, getting older is not a gift. But we had better make it one or be left with the knowledge that we have been ungrateful for life itself.

  ON THE PAIN OF LOSING A FRIEND THROUGH MISHANDLING

  I think it is so difficult to lose a friend because there is a side of ourselves that is forever hidden except in their specific presence. We miss them, in part, because we miss that part of ourselves that is only activated in their presence. Conversely, there are people we avoid because they bring out parts of ourselves we would prefer not to look at. The sad thing is that when friends withdraw from us it is often because we bring out the worst in them.

  A quick trip to New York made me long to be there more. When I emerge from Penn Station into the soupy air that smells of grime and chestnuts, old urine and sun, I feel connected to the world again. Everybody I brush by gives me energy, so that by the time I am halfway down the block I feel huge with life, even if I have no one to meet.

  Subways are particularly evocative. I watched a young couple standing by the doors, swaying gently toward each other, so filled with attraction I marveled at their ability to keep their clothes on. Aboveground, there is such brilliant packaging of goods. A two-block stretch of Columbus Avenue easily relieved me of a hundred dollars: magazines, a shirt, a cup of coffee, and several bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar from a tiny, perfectly appointed shop that sold nothing but Italian oil, vinegar, salt, olives, and dipping dishes. Next door was a shop that sold nothing but products containing lavender.