Stars. Rain. Sun. Moon. (And Only the Children Can Begin to Explain)

…My ex wife calls me.
This is nothing extraordinary.
We share a child and talk every day.
More than that, we like and trust each other.

My ex wife calls me, and she’s crying, I can hear it.

This woman, my ex wife, the only one who loved me and still does in the way I want to understand love.

And I think how it is between us, how we’ve emotionally weaned ourselves off of each other, that painful and necessary process.

She calls and she’s crying, this woman, my ex wife, who lives on the other of a thin and deep chasm. Each of us, on our side, we have our worlds. But sometimes we run up to the edge, each of us, face to face, voice to voice, I can see her and she can see me.

You can’t leap over. I can’t go into her world. She can’t go into mine. But we can stand at the edges of our worlds. We can each of reach and almost touch.

This, as far as I can guess, is a best case scenario with exs.

…Sometimes, I find girls in my orbit.
This is not to suggest that I carry that kind of weight, that kind of gravitation, that I’m a planet and everybody else is moon.

All of us, sometimes we’re planets, sometimes we’re moons, and it hardly matters which, the universe is so vast, the astral bodies so many.

But sometimes I go still, and people always come round to look at still thing; they want to think about what it means and in that study they come to recognize the distance in which I already believe.

What I wonder sometimes, when I’m orbited or in orbit, when I’m closer to connected than most things are but still miles away, what I wonder is if I’ve ever been available, if anybody ever had a fair shake, if I did.

You ask yourself about the sickness. You ask yourself, Where did I catch this? Was it in my genes? Is it terminal? How long can I live like this?

You know how it is. You wonder how lost you really are. These girls in your orbit, or if we’re really talking about you, and we might be, perhaps it is boys. Whatever it is that moves around you, you wonder you’ll ever do more than plant a flag. Then take a step. And fly away again.

…
…My wife, she is crying on the phone because our little dog, Ginger, she’s too old for anything but pain, she’s going to the vet, meeting that shot, going to die now, quietly, without knowing that is death.

That’s how I think about it.
Strange that we give shots to dogs and consider it humane but wouldn’t do that for a human.

…Ginger, we got her, years ago, before we were aware that our marriage was doomed. From the pound, where we walked dogs, where we’d accidentally adopted one and then there she was, a puppy mill dog, with her teats hanging down, her fur all matted, close to death they said, just needing a place to die in a year or so.

Maybe they believed that; maybe that’s what the people that dropped her off said about her. That she was close to death. Or maybe they just wanted us to take her.

They’d guessed her for fifteen; they claimed her that eight years ago.

She didn’t die. She got a haircut. She got spunky. She moved around with us.
Me, my ex wife, my sontobe who was coursing around in the veins of us both, and the other dog, Saint.

Ginger, Saint, my ex wife, me, and the child we would someday make between us.

…When I was in Beirut, my ex wife, she called, crying like that, the way she was today, only she wasn’t my ex and Ginger wasn’t old, wasn’t going to be dead, but Saint, the other dog, the dog at the pound who stood in his little pen with a sign hanging on it that said BITE DOG looking half expectant, he’d gone missing.

My ex wife and my son, waiting for six weeks since his birth to pass so they could fly over, across the Atlantic and be with me again, they were there with Saint and Ginger and Saint had gone missing.

I felt that he was alive, just a little lost.
Don’t worry, I told her. You’ll find him.

One of those things where you can be write and wrong at the same time.

…In the evening, after dark, the Beirut night where the bats dive after clumps of berries that fall from the weeping tree, I went up the big steps, up through the campus, off to the internet café where I could call the States cheaply.

She’d just found him, in the fields, where the coyotes had run him down.

And I can’t hate the coyotes.

…Leave it to us, to this species, to make of dead dogs symbols for relationships gone wrong. You see the problem with that? I do. He was more than that. Everything that lives and wants to is more than a comment on the things we’ve fucked up or done perfectly.

The duck on your wall, that’s not a symbol of your marksmanship, or you stoicism, not a talisman against the other powers of the world.

That fish on your plate, that not proof of your good taste, your position on top of the food chain.

That dog half eaten in the field, that not omen of the death of your marriage.

That’s a real dog, and a real fish, and a real duck, and their lives, they were as sacred to them as yours is to you. As sacred as the lives of your loved ones to you. Those living things.

…I was wrong and I was right. She found him but it was not ok.

And staggering back through that Beirut night, where the lights come up off the Mediterranean, where the bats dive for berry bundles that fall from the weeping tree and where the cats all stray patter and freeze and patter, I didn’t know what to feel.

I mean I knew, but I couldn’t feel it.
Because I was half a world away?
Because I was alone?
Because nothing is real right away when you don’t want it to be.

Not your marriage, not your divorce, not the death of anything whose live you value.

…My dark apartment, a light on in the kitchen, and figures moving in there, this Beirut night, the sisters, very poor and very proud girls, girls whose mother cooked for me, having come into my apartment to leave me food and do my dishes.

These sisters trying to take of a man because his wife was half a world away and they didn’t think a man could take care of himself.

They break into my apartment to do my dishes, to wash my kitchen floor.

And me, not ready, in my haze, in my shock, shattered awake by the sudden presence in the kitchen doorway, screaming more loudly than I’d scream if in normal circumstances I faced a madman with an axe.
Screaming about everything, the death of everything, Saint, my own, yours, my loudest scream ever, the truest scream of my life, absolute terror.
And she screamed to, that sister.

We stood there screaming.

And when it stopped, I knew what to do.

Just sob.

…And now Ginger.
Her moment has passed.
A symbol of nothing.

It doesn’t stop us, not really. Maybe we scream, but we do what we do. We do not freeze.

We teach our classes. We write our blogs. We take our phone calls. Watch our television.

…On this day, I learn that I have a choice to make between doing something good and doing something that is not good. It isn’t so much that there is a good thing to do as that there is a bad thing not to do, but I can make the bad thing seem good.

Sometimes we find ways to feed our beasts and tell ourselves that good will come out of it beyond the pleasure it brings us.

This thing, it is nothing I’ve nurtured or known about, and it’s not what you think, whatever you think.

I promise you’ve got it wrong, whatever act of thievery or seduction you envision, that real only in the very generalities, in the way that must everything we do is an act of thievery or seduction.

The details are wrong, I promise, and more than that, they’re under-important.

This thing, it’s just something that from grave distance and sudden stillness I recognize as a bad thing that I’d probably momentarily enjoy doing.

…Once, I knew the grandfather of a friend.

This old man, he was deep in Alzheimer’s.

He never said anything you could understand. It was all gibberish, mostly in German, often he would sing it. This old sad-eyed Jew who had come from before the war.

This friend of mine, the grandson, he was trying to take care. He’d come get me, having lost his grandfather, having left a door unlocked, and we’d go looking and find the old man wandering around in a parking garage, staring into the corner or a lobby, standing on the sidewalk and studying the cars that passed.

This old man, in all that time I knew him, he offered me only one sentence that made sense; he said five words that added up to anything.

He said, You have a good soul.
He said it clearly.

He didn’t have to mean it. He certainly didn’t have to see it. I didn’t have to believe he saw anything good in me or meant what he was saying.

I didn’t have to think they were more than words, accidentally coming together. The way sometimes the dead seem animate because of gasses moving through the body.

He didn’t have to know what he was saying or who he was saying it too.

It was almost irrelevant, that sudden opinion in the midst of the chaos that defined him, that thing we could never get a hold of, that nobody knew how to control.

What it made me do, though, what he said, it made me feel like I wanted to make him right.

…Now I have a choice, and I don’t know what I’ll decide.
I think I know.
I think I’ve recognized bad and good.
I know at this moment what I’ve decided.

But my recognition will have to stand up to a lot. It may have to stand up to me second guessing, to me trying to separate what is truly bad and good from what we’ve been taught by our religious leaders, our school teachers, our society keepers.

I think I know what I think. What the real me things. But I’m not sure.

I think I know what I mean.

I knew when I married what it meant. What I meant for it to mean. That promise.
I knew when I divorced what it meant, too.

I wasn’t prepared for anything. I’m not prepared for anything. For any marriage, for any divorce, for any death.

Men, they don’t like change. Men, they focus on what is gone and what is lost, not what is there. Maybe it’s not just men. Maybe it’s just human. Maybe it’s even beyond that.

In any case, can we be held accountable for what we promised some time ago?

…L Cohen writes:
Through the days of pain that are coming
Through the nights of wild distress
Though our promises count for nothing
We must keep them nonetheless.