When things happen in my life…things that loosen a shingle or 30…I tend to think a lot about what happened, how it happened and the always impossible, why it happened. I bevome a seeker of answers, if only for brief period of time. My becoming a “do-er”, takes more time.
I was days away from buying a new home that had AMAZING potential when my life changed in about seven ways over the course of a few hours. Doctors, shrinks and well meaning friends will tell you to do nothing drastic for a year. Make no big or rash decisions. Keep the ones you must make to a minimum, such as , “Do I want mayo or mustard OR BOTH on my hamburger today?”
But I just got back from Lake Tahoe a few days ago. It was lovely. Possibly a bit too soon to have been moved completely by its beauty, but then again, that’s just me. I take time to process good things. Bad thing are immediate.
I should explain that my sisters made it a point for this trip not to be about me. It was never intended to be. We planned it in November. And as much as I tried to keep it about sisters and nieces and snow and unbebelievably stunning vistas, bits and pieces of selfish old me crept in. I kept thinking about all the changes in my life. Oh, it didn’t happen that often, but thoughts were hard to quell when conversations of husbands, marriage and children reared their heads. I think at ten thousand feet, it only made it worse.
Or maybe, it made things clearer. Not better. But clearer.
I listened to their stories, never trying to convey any similarities or comparisons between them and the life of a brain-addled spinster, former career woman. We’ve all had such similar and extremely different life experiences. Ive seen both sisters on their knees, one questioning God over the tragic loss of her 19 year old daughter. I’ve seen my other sister bemoan the odds of survival for a gravely ill grandson.
And God knows they seen me in traction for three months, strung out on pills and heartbroken over the latest shit stain I allowed in my life. But it hasn’t been all bad. There were flirtations with joy here and there but the fact is, Life is hard. And it’s usually very ordinary. And repetitive. We just don’t bandy about the term “miracle” around so much anymore. At least I don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I know they happen, but I don’t feel like they happen TO ME that often.
I kinda wish I was some little Nazarene kid who lived in a time of miracles like witnessing burning chariots that flew across the sky or I bore witness to the catch of the day being miraculously turned into a lot of bread. But that was then; we’re more enlightened people. Weve learned how to learn. We’re educated. Because we understand, logic has replaced magic, and miracles? They happen, but they don’t get the ink like they used to. Por ejemplo: say someone opens a bag of cheesy doodles, grabs one and just before it becomes a part of his lunch, the guy looks down at one and sees the face of Jesus (and why are the faces of Buddha and Mohammed almost always left out of the mix???) That makes all the news channels. Even The Blaze.
But let’s go beyond that, shall we? A young deaf girl is ice skating and she falls through the ice and ten days she can hear for the first time in her life. A man is walking through the woods enjoying a bologna sandwich. A hungry bear comes out of nowhere, but a squirrel intercedes doing a spot on Jimmy Cagney impression and the bear stops snd instead chooses to hit up a nearby campsite with what smells like yummy hot dogs on the grill. Whiff, sniff!! Mmmmm…wait! Wait! They’re Nathan’s!!! This discerning and possibly kosher bear leaves our bologna hiker to his sandwich. A miracle? Yes. But what about the ordinary kind?
I’ll never win an Olympic gold medal for anything. Sheer laziness keeps me from writing the award winning screen play that could revive Burt Reynold’s career. By the same token, I’ll never get testicular cancer or spontaneously combust during a prostate exam. Or I can be more gender neutral and assume it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever get trapped in a lava flow in Guam while eating Fruit Loops.
These are a lovely malange of impossibilities and improbabilities. But if you consider all the unlikely things that COULD happen and there are many, at least one of those more subtle miracles will happen or have happened to regular people. And they won’t be headline grabbers. Princess Diana married Prince Charles. Meryl Streep won three Oscars, but five years ago, I turned 55 and quit or walked away from everything and everyone I knew and moved to the Texas HillCountry where I became nieghbors with a yenta who’s shares a nickname with a condiment. Was that my miracle? One of them. Yes, one of them.
When I was in the hospital after the severe carbaccident in 1992, I was constantly told how lucky I was to have survived the wreck. Survived? Only to have been maimed and forced to live in pain every fucking day for the rest of my life???
Some dared to say it was my fate that I lived. It was my destiny that I survived. Really? I think there’s a lot of confusion over the words fate and destiny. As if my walking again was a miracle, and ok it might have been , then again, why question it if my ability to walk was never in doubt because walking was also my destiny. But what if I’d been killed in that truck crashed at the bottom of a creek bed off of Interstate 10, more than 25 years ago? Would people have commented on the miracle of my death?? I died and death was my destiny, yes, but was it also my miracle? No. But why wouldn’t that have been discussed as such? Must a miracle only have a positive outcome???????
I thought about Alex in Tahoe. Not a lot, but enough to keep the hoarding alive. I keep hoarding so many truths about what our relationship was and wasn’t, it’s like a sad little apartment in Queens. Piles of stuff everywhere you look marked accordingly. Such as “what was”, “what never was” and the tallest of the lot, “what the fuck was I thinking ??”
After he died and I got sick, I felt like a needed a miracle. So, I watched a bunch of documentaries, read as much as I could about them and to be honest, I have no more of an idea of miracles as I did before. Maybe I need to be the miracle for someone else. Maybe I need to be that squirrel with the Jimmy Cagney impersonation down pat. Maybe I need to write more, for Burt Reynolds if for no other reason.
I don’t know, kids. I just don’t know.
The one/two punch of this brain thing I have and Alex’s untimely departure have left me feeling emotionally and mentally drained one minute, then rife with thought the next. The short cycling mania is exhausting. I’m so sure of things one minute, then doubting everything the next. I know 2+2=4. I can count so I can prove that theirybto be true. I can use rocks, pieces of candy, tiles in my bathroom. Two pairs of shoes will do the trick. Props always help.
But yet I know sunshine exists because it casts a shadow behind a solid mass and beyond a certain time of day, it goes away. But it comes back and its proof is proven once again.
Miracles as we know them happen because of the presence of something or someone. Someone had enough money to pay for a badly needed operation, a rescue occurred because of timing, dumb luck or some kind of weird crack in the space-time continuum allowed whatever natural law to be defied for just that doltish second.
The other kind miracles occurred because of absences. No one was there. Nothing happened. Natural law occurred. But even so, they really were, no less miraculous. If you marvel at all it takes to live, you must be fair and marvel at what it takes to die.
But don’t believe me. I have a brain thing. To me, imperfection is constant. Hate is an ugly option. Eggs are an odd menu choice. Love is strange. Life is stranger. It’s reasonable and irrational. Brilliant and stupid. Shapeless yet perfectly sculpted. I know 2 + 2 = 4, but sometimes, SOMETIMES it just has to equal 5 to keep it interesting.