And Now, Having Given Thanks…: On Stories, Still Going

[Image: “Sunup/Sundown (Twentynine Palms, California),” by John E. Simpson. I suppose there’s an implicit subtitle here, too, something like: “Does It Matter?”]

From whiskey river:

If you’re reading this, if there’s air in your lungs on this November day, then there is still hope for you. Your story is still going. And maybe some things are true for all of us. Perhaps we all relate to pain. Perhaps we all relate to fear and loss and questions. And perhaps we all deserve to be honest, all deserve whatever help we need. Our stories are all so many things: Heavy and light. Beautiful and difficult. Hopeful and uncertain. But our stories are not finished yet. There is still time, for things to heal and change and grow. There is still time to be surprised. We are still going, you and I. We are stories still going.

(Jamie Tworkowski [source])

Not from whiskey river:

…occasionally I have these moments where it all hits me—the filter of familiarity that colors everything mundane falls from my eyes, and it’s glorious again. I can see it all anew with the eyes that accompany me on my travels. I’ll ask myself, “How is it possible to take all of this beauty for granted?” And when this happens, I always think of “You Are My Sunshine,” and how there hasn’t been a single moment of my life where this song felt unknown to me. I think about how long it took before I even thought of it as a song. And even longer before I contemplated the fact that someone had to have written it. An individual human person had made it up before anyone else had ever heard it.

How is it that this song can feel like it has always existed? Weren’t we all just born to this song? Born to breathe this song like the air in our lungs? It’s easy to overlook the blue in the sky, I guess. But it’s important to come home and be reminded of how special it is. How does a song become a home? The same way houses do. People have to live in them. Life has to happen inside of them. Laughing, crying, shouting. A song is a home when it matters not at all who’s singing it, young or old. It’s built for any voice.

(Jeff Tweedy [source])

…and, for obvious reasons:

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My family — my birth family, especially — has been singularly blessed (by fate, by genetics, by lifestyle, by simple good luck). My Dad died prematurely, as it seems to me now — stricken by cancer in his mid-60s — and it certainly seemed tragic at the time (1988). Long before then, his own Dad had died — within a year of my birth. His wife, my “Nan,” passed 18 years later, in 1970. On Mom’s side of the family, we lost her father, “Pop-Pop,” in ’82, and his wife, “Mom-Mom,” twelve years later. Of course numerous cousins, aunts, and uncles, to say nothing of well-loved in-laws and the extended family of step-families and non-related friends we’ve picked up, have also (as the saying goes) gone on to their reward, leaving behind grieving families and dear friends. But on the whole, over long stretches of time, death has seemed remote: we would always have the core people, bound by blood, around us. And, too, there’s the “plus side”: nephews and nieces and their own little families have sprung up, adding to the delight of family reunions, holiday meals, simple hours-long visits. Most importantly: we love one another.

In short, to repeat: singularly blessed.

But honestly, I’ve gotta say, it’s hard to greet new days, months, years, with a clear and sunlit mind — exactly because I know how lucky we’ve been. I do not look forward to turning new calendar pages. It’s a statistical certainty, ultimately: we will not always have the core people around us. (Also, duh: we ourselves will not be among the ones left behind.) At the root of the family tree, Mom is now in her 90s; on her heels, my stepfather and my Uncle Jack. My three younger siblings and I are not all in our 70s, but we’re all at least knocking on that decade’s door. Even at the outermost branch tips, the little ones — their crazy, exaggerated, artificial-but-authentic smiles radiating out from family group photos — well, I worry about them, constantly…

So many things ready to go wrong, y’know?

When I first woke up this morning, I immediately closed my eyes again and fell into a dream:

I was sitting in a comfortable chair. On my lap was a BIG book, one of those commonly dubbed “coffee-table books” because they’re too heavy and cumbersome to be on your lap for very long before you’ve gotta set them aside. It had no dust cover, just a simple cloth one in brown, with it’s (unremembered) title stamped in gold lettering. No author’s name appeared on the cover; the pages were heavyweight and cream colored. I opened the book to the first page of text.

There was a chapter title in all capital letters, but I don’t recall what it was. The narrative seemed to be along the lines of an historical novel, narrated in the first person — the opening sentence something like, “When I first met the Countess [etc.]…” There was a photo at the top of the page, something like this one:

[A streeeeeeetched out, desaturated version of a favorite photo I took in the Old Town district of Eureka, California, in June 2022. It was probably in my head because a monochrome version of the original serves as my desktop computer’s wallpaper photo, so I see it numerous times every day.]

The typeface in which the text was set was a formal, serif face — Garamond, I think — and went on uninterrupted (and unread) for several pages… and then stopped.

Well, no, not quite stopped: from that point, the printed book — presumably the story — continued as a journal. Page after unlined page filled with handwritten text… which stopped, in the middle of a sentence, maybe a third of the way in — the rest of the pages blank. The handwriting had obviously been added over the course of some time, because some of it was in pencil, some in black or blue ink, and the lines slanted up or down from one point to another.

And boy did I recognize the handwriting: it was, of course, my own.

I don’t know if that dream was of a piece with the meditations in this post’s preceding sections, but it’s hard for me, right now, to disentangle them. I suppose I need to think about it some more.