Really, y’all, I’m awfully conventional; all my memories, even the ones only a week old, live half in Hobbiton, half under the name of Sanders.
Or maybe Tolkien and Milne really saw the true life, the heart’s life, and the nearer the truth I get, the less my conceited hankering to be original gets in the way?
Anyhow, here’s a little sketch from life for y’all. It’s as true as I can make it, which means, of course, imperfect and partial. This one’s especially for my new readers: welcome!
Night. Cicadas holler outside.
Half my descriptions of night start this way, cicadas hollering. Same verb, same glad shout. Every tree, I’m convinced, is different, and any failure in how I write about trees is mine in describing them, but cicadas are eternally One, one with the One.
Ask an individual cicada what he thinks about that.
Inside, I’m burning a lavender candle that doesn’t have much scent and holding a mug of tea between both hands.
Before it melts, the wax in the wide-mouth candle jar looks creamy and pitted, maybe like it had been suspended in time at a near-boil. Bubbles hover just under the surface, some few erupting into tiny pockmarks.
It’s been eight days since this happened. The mug of ginger tea, the candle in its glass jar. Already, you know, I’m different. Already, I believe in eucatastrophe here, here, and, God help me, did I write those words, I believe, as a confession or as a dare?
Do your worst, universe!
Oh, it does, it does.
The old gods were jealous of too-happy mortals.
Yet for so long their cold glare kept me alive.
Keep dancing, runt. Perform for us. Keep that game face on. Stiff upper lip —
I won’t tell you what the eucatastrophe is or how it happened, but I’ll give the dreary, exacting powers this story as an offering, the last they’ll have of me, perhaps, because I believe (by-life, you see, I’ll stake my life on it, though I have no particular evidence or intuition or insight) the One is Love.
And then, as Papa Plotinus teaches, the true Apollo and the other gods in their true selves, not their corrupted myth-selves, aren’t capricious at all but follow the mind of the One like dancers bending their steps to the choreographer’s design.
I know you’re not supposed to will the Divine into being, but I will that to be true, I will it, I know you’re supposed to surrender, Randy tells me all the time, but how can I let go when it’s only my most strenuous efforts holding the chaotic gods at bay?
Because I will to.
It’s not supposed to be will —
…
If you don’t trust — if one doesn’t trust, if I don’t trust, if we don’t trust — the God of Love with your love, you will lose your love. If you — if one, if I, if we — trust the God of Love with your love — one’s love, my love our love — we will find our love.
…
…
…
In that spirit, then, and maybe a touch more clingy hope than is really appropriate, this offering. One hobbit-hole night.
A few hours before I drink my tea that one time out of all the thousands of other times, or about week before I’m writing this, the cicadas are hollering outside.
They’re louder, this time, because we’re in Randy’s cabin-style house halfway White Oak Mountain. Open the back door and you can’t hear yourself think. The mountains resound with praise — about a million voices per square acre, though it’s literally their tymbals, not cymbals, you see, but tymbals, the vibratory organs on the males’ abdomens, that make that glorious oscillatory shout.
We’re in the kitchen with the hand-stitched curtains framing the small window, the kitchen decorated in a style Randy describes as “country kitsch.” It’s the decor of our childhood. Photos plaster the fridge, cross-stitched Bible verses grace the walls, and ceramic chickens squawk and peck on top of the china cabinet.
Randy’s mother is putting away the soup pot and utensils. I just helped carry supper dishes from the table and was about to rinse them when Randy took them from me and put them under the tap. Empty-handed, then, I watch the dance that is Randy and Randy’s mother moving past each other in the snug space.
“Will you make me some tea?” I ask him.
“Yeah, when I’m finished mixing this.”
Randy had his protein shake earlier. Now he’s making himself a tumblerful of a veggie drink. Stirred into water, the kelp or whatever-it-is looks like the sludgy Instant Breakfast my dad used to drink in the 1970s, but greener.
Randy takes the spoon out of the protein powder, looks at it, licks it, and then dips it in the powdered greens.
“How does it taste dry?” I ask.
“How does what taste?”
“The green stuff.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never tasted it dry.”
“But you just licked the spoon,” I object.
“No I didn’t,” he insists.
At this point Randy’s mother pricks up her ears. “You licked the spoon?”
“No,” he says, “I didn’t lick my drink mix off the spoon, I licked protein powder. It’s chocolate flavored.”
Randy’s mother looks affectionate and exasperated. “But then you put the wet spoon in the other container, now there’s moisture in there.”
Randy looks from the spoon to the jar of protein supplement to the plastic bag where he keeps his dried veggies. But we’re distracting him from his mission; he’s making me a cup of tea, so he finds a cup, positions the cup on the Keurig, and hits the button to fill it with hot water.
Behind his back, Randy’s mother gives me a look, wrinkling her nose: yuck. In turn I pantomime licking a spoon. Our dear boy, our looks say to each other, this funny dear boy.
Randy keeps on futzing with the Keurig.
Joy at his antics bubbles up in my chest like a laugh. Having his mother to share that joy with redoubles it. The gold-and-brown kitchen, a story off the ground but dim and warm as a hobbit-hole, hovers like a small, warm globe among the oak trees. I want to include Randy in the warmth, the joke. “We’re making fun of you behind your back,” I tell him.
Randy takes the cup off the Keurig and frowns at it. “I just used my coffee cup for your hot water. I’ll have to start again.”
Randy’s mother says, “But you wash your coffee cup, don’t you?”
He starts to answer but doesn’t finish his sentence. He gets a different cup, a flowered china cup, from the cabinet. He pours off the coffee-tinged water from his cup, places the clean cup in its place, and starts the Keurig again.
Compunction seizes me and I fling myself at him, wrapping my arms around him. “I’m sorry, I was teasing you and distracted you. It’s my fault. We shouldn’t make fun of you. I’m sorry.”
He returns my hug. “It’s all right,” he says — stiffly? I can’t tell.
“I won’t make fun of you any more tonight,” I tell him.
After I’m finished hugging him, Randy’s mother takes her turn. “I’m sorry,” she tells him. He hugs her back. “It’s all right.”
Maybe he hadn’t realized — but he must have known — how much we love him, how we laugh with exasperation and delight.
At home I sit with my mug of tea in my hands and the purple candle that doesn’t smell too much like lavender at my elbow. Not gonna lie, I’m picking my legs to bits, fingers finding hair follicles and scratch-scratch-scratching them open, this is how my last eczema flare-up started, did I ever mention that?
You should see the scars.
The eucatastrophe hadn’t happened yet that night, and besides, the gods are jealous and I’m afraid they’ve noticed how happy I am.
Did I make him angry? I ask myself. Did that little fall in his voice mean he was annoyed? I am tempted to — but do not — call and ask whether I did something wrong. I already apologized and received an answer. I’m not going to make Randy nuts by apologizing for the same small thing over and over unasked.
Bubbles float past. In one, the joyful, funny five minutes in the country-kitsch kitchen plays over, untouched. This is the true memory, the material facts, powder on the spoon, arms around shoulders, a mug of tea held out in cupped hands.
In another bubble, Randy and I are standing on the deck outside his kitchen door, two flights of stairs above the ground. We hug each other goodbye and share kisses. My cheek. Under his ear. I look at Randy and he’s smiling at me like the very sun itself, and I’m so dizzy with joy it turns into vertigo: how could the sun love such a small creature as I am? How could a single daisy aspire to be loved by the glorious sun?
Joy/despair. Balance/fall.
I forget, most of the time, that his smile is just as much a reflection as is mine, and yet no dead end, either: each rejoicing in God in each.
The vertigo is in my mind, mine, nothing to do with Randy, and once again I throw myself backward off the rotting wood of the deck and fall and keep falling through a summer night and into an October afternoon and the warm grass that catches me, the firm ground that holds me, is Randy’s stern and gentle and compassionate heart.
Sometimes I tell Randy I’m Piglet. He is Pooh Bear, rooting around his kitchen for honey, licking one sticky spoon after the next. I’m Piglet, a small pink creature who’s very often anxious.
“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
Despite myself I call Randy on the phone.
“I’m feeling a bit Piglet tonight.”
Randy laughs kindly at me. I recognize that laugh. It’s the way Randy’s mother and I laughed at him in the hobbit-hole kitchen.
“Piglet has nothing to worry about,” he says.