Home Again


I am looking across the table where Linda is being smothered with affection from grandchildren. "You aren't jealous, are you?" Kerrie, her son's wife, asks me.
"Hell yes. Are those children bothering you, ma'am?"
"My grandma," the boy says, and from the other side the Queen of Time and Space argues for possession, "My grandma."
Interesting to think about how that happens. One day you're at the bottom of the deck, and then the dealings done, and you're in for a grand and you're called. Put your cards on the table.

Linda's a smart cookie. It isn't just ordinary smart, it's mathematical smart. She can figure things out. The little girl is like that. It's already evident that she's got a brain that's cooking on high heat. In the first grade she's leaving the teachers slightly stunned. Smart kid. She and Linda have the same blonde hair, and the child was delivered on Linda's birthday. Quite a gift, the Queen of Time and Space.

Yesterday was our first day back home, and we went out for Mexican food with "the kids," which includes both children and grandchildren. They all come under the umbrella of "the kids," while we try to get used to being "grand." It's easy, actually. You just enjoy age instead of envying youth. Every age has its peculiar resonance, and nothing is more a waste of time than trying to repeat what has disappeared into the past. Being at the door of old age is feeling the approach of death. Nothing else can strip you clean of illusions, and nothing else can make you comprehend the power of love.

Love is the only thing that can deal with death. One of my friends sent me this quote from Mozart:

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love love, that is the soul of genius."

Love gets easier, or maybe more familiar, if you can hold on to it into old age. Today we went to see my parents; my dad's eighty-eight and mom's eighty-four. They are living alone in the country, taking care of an acre of grass and trees, a well, and their house. They're also looking after a dog and a goldfish. There is a light around them, now. They are showing the way into the later stages of old age, and they have worked their way through all the layers of resistance. They don't have time anymore for that which is not love.

Coming home again is remembering that love is a gift. You don't owe it to anybody. In fact, it has been my experience that when somebody tries to call it in as a debt, I default. It's mine to give but I don't owe it. If I did I'd be deprived of giving it. Maybe I'd end up in the salt mines of love or the coal mines of love or maybe the mimes of love would come haul me away. "Where are you taking me? Say something for god's sake, you're making me crazy here."

Asturias writes that "in the end, love is inhuman, like the tecuna. It's hidden snout seeks out the root of life," or something like that. What the hell; I've quoted this from Asturias before, but I have to begin to practice repeating my stories. This is from "Men of Maize," and it's sexy. I hate to jump right from love to sex, but c'est la vie; they're joined at the hip ... (and I'm still jet lagged).

Tecunas -- it’s less direct to think of them in the plural -- some have within their secret parts the bodies of small palpitating birds, others the downiness of aquatic plants which begin vibrating as the current of the male swirls through; and the magic ones have sexes like pleated bundles which gradually fold and unfold in the ecstasy of love, there where the blood drives its last living distances in an organism that is possessed, then leaps to become the beginning of another living distance. In the final plunge, love is inhuman like a tecuna. Its hidden snout seeks out the root of life. You exist more. In those moments you exist more. The tecuna weeps, struggles, bites, squeezes, tries to get up, gasps, mouthes, sweats, scratches, and is left like a wasp unable to buzz, as though she were dead from suffering. But she has left her sting in the man who had her beneath the breathing of his desire. Liberation ties them together!

Posted: Thu - March 30, 2006 at 09:00 PM