Ruffled Domestic Bliss
A decision was called for now.
It’s Sunday.
Santa Fes’ mystical gloriousness most evident.
As contagious as Edward Hoppers’ Sunday Morning, the calm undeniable.
Until a short while ago, it felt like a free day; you know? It’s like Sunday is a gift. Just that simple. Yet, no one named Sunday with the added description: ‘and today you will feel peace and happiness and you will feel motivated to do great things…’
To unfurl yet even more, I’d reflected on the wonder that is Santa Fe and its desert surroundings. The stark contrast between here in the high country versus our previous home in southern Missouri. The rarefied difference is so stark and this all the more elevates our experience here in this place.
Ah yes, so peaceful…
But here we are, stomach pain is clear. Was clear. Need not analyze it into the next county either. Shouldn’t and didn’t until Al and Betsy just came over with their load of unwelcome news. I forget who said that. I think I related it to a talk given at a meditation retreat place several years ago: ‘… best not to unknot your load of unwelcome news…’. Yes, something about not making a home out of one’s pain and sorrows…
Something I just may be very good at.
A Buddhist talk, of course. And there was some laughing and then the meditation leader, a voice of mostly unquestionable authority, had authored several books on the matter, confirmed that: ‘no, we don’t want to analyze it to death, as this only opens it all up and gets us sucked into its dream, its unreality…’
Wish I could remember in relation to what Buddhist lesson this sprang from, certainly nothing to do with our neighbors’ sudden new unexpected load.
But it seems to make some sense now as we sit here with our good friends and attempt once again to get this new conundrum done away with. It also makes extreme, logical sense that we can’t ignore or pretend that life’s’ pains don’t happen!
I wonder what my friend Al does to attract trouble. I should ask him, but then that might ignite trailers which I don’t have the time for just now. Don’t know. Al and Betsy are sure going to have to come up with some solution.
Well, in short, maybe it is those damn pills of mine again, geez! That and that Al and Betsy are too damned soft. Easy marks to push around…
&&&
So, backing up by minutes, some neighbors of ours were just over. Served smoking fresh brewed. So, the almost mystical calm that a Santa Fe Sunday, as the sunrise bathes everything in life giving gold, was, well, all messed up.
Damn it.
The strange thing it was both of them, husband and wife. Usually when Al and Betsy popped over for a quick catch up over coffee or a beer, if it was later on, it was usually one or the other. Rarely both unless it was an invite to an early dinner thing.
Santa Fe can be unusually fresh this time of year. It was still early enough in the morning where the birds were chirping enthusiastically. Dogs in the neighborhood barked at the garbage pickup. A welcome morning, high desert breeze shuffled the leaves of our yard full of elms.
Our aging yellow lab, Kitch, was sniffing around for the pesky moles.
My buddy Al moaned, comically in lament.
Betsy stayed quiet but placed a comforting hand on her husband’s shoulder. They’d just taken an uninvited guest into their home. ‘A friend’ of their son knocked on their door just an hour before. They’d barely started eating breakfast. Their son, who was currently starting a new tech job hundreds of miles away, had written a messy and frenzied email.
The friend suddenly appeared at their front door, almost pleading to be allowed in.
Al said his son Bobby had written the cryptic email as if done in a rush. Saying that he’d so greatly appreciate it if they’d help, he said his friend was not from Santa Fe, that he was a loner.
Strangely enough, the letter was even less clear than the usual fractured communiques from their son. Nowhere was there mention that within the hour Mark, his best friend, would bang on the door.
Al added: ‘We thought we knew Bobbys best friends.’
‘Whoa, hold on Al, so he just now showed up and asked to stay with you guys?’ I said looking at Betsy.
‘Yeah Mike, it’s like he just showed up and, at one point, broke into tears, smelling like a brewery. He said his wife was cheating on him, caught them in their bedroom after coming home early from a work trip to the city. To worsen things, his early arrival was because he’d just been fired.’ His wife Betsy spoke up. Normally not a shy or quiet person, this thing seemed to have squashed her usual lively personality and her love for being the center of the party.
‘Jesus, so what’s the big… what’s he going to do? I mean. I’m guessing this can’t be for too long, right? Maybe a couple days? It might even be some fun…’ My wife Sylvia tried to help.
Betsy countered: ‘Oh come on Sylvia, are you kidding? How’s this supposed to be fun? He told us he’d lost his job and didn’t really explain why. He said he’d been fighting with his wife more than usual. Then he lost his work. The drinking can’t help. He was almost in tears and asked us for a drink!’ Betsy’s’ face was one of desperation and of being caught completely by surprise.
‘So now what the hell are we supposed to do?’ Betsy pushed. Both she and Al left the house to work every day and were just getting by. She held down a shift at the paper plant on the outskirts of town, and Al was a maintenance man for a farm implements store.
While our friends were sitting in front of me and my wife, their new visitor was over at their place drinking Al’s precious rum, stretched out on their new sofa, smelly bare feet probably snuggled under new cushions, watching a movie.
&&&
What might that look like? What would it feel like? A double whammy: he gets fired then comes home to catch his wife in bed making passionate love with a stranger. Were it me, I thought, what might that be like?
I’d leave, damn it. A bag of clothes, a book, a laptop, and a notebook are what I would pack. I mean first, if the guy doing my wife were beatable, I’d beat the pulp out of him. With my favorite Louisville Slugger. Then I sure wouldn’t show up at a friend’s house ungrateful like, or empty-handed. I’d at least bring a basket full of basic staples to show my good faith.
But then we’re right back into it. I know myself enough to know that this would never, ever happen. Like never, okay? I’d never crash at someone’s house. Reason is that it would go too against type. Too against the image I project. Who I am. Might even cause an unsettling reaction by my kind hosts. So no, I could never bring myself to dump myself onto their kindness.
It just wouldn’t feel right.
Not even as a favor to my son, no matter how messed up his son’s friend was. Well, okay, if the friend was a really great guy and of course my wife insisted.
You, see? Just the thinking of such behavior is enough to stir waves of unrest in my heart. It’s like a: ‘stay away from me, stay far away from these shores…,’ kind of thought. Which I think is a shame. I think a good person should show no fear of examining these very human sentiments. Lend a hand. Still, I was glad it wasn’t us.
There I went off into my odd thought patterns. After the doc had started me on those new meds for my thyroid and anxiety (little blue guys), I found that I’d just go off into thinking to myself.
After all, I thought, this sort of behavior, this guy showing up like that, is hardly something never seen or heard of. It happens. How many of us have never heard of a story that sort of fits those parameters? Presents the valid question: does it happen more to the young versus the old? Something tells me this is as it is. The likelihood that someone ‘lost’ who shows at your doorstep will most likely be young.
Older, we’ve learned how to boil in our personal hells in solitude and stoic grace.
‘Jesus Mike, don’t tell me you’re off to la la land again? You guys, Mike, takes these pills now for his throat condition and for something else and it sends him to weird places in his head. Can you believe it?’ What Sylvia just said would’ve brought laughter all around, but right now there was nothing to laugh about.
I ask then, should something like this happen does it necessarily cause an upset beyond recovery in the home front? You know, a friend, distraught over who knows what marital cataclysm, drug misuse, job failure, knocks on your door. Nine of ten times you, the lost and hurt friend, or brother; Jesus, I hadn’t thought if it had been my brother; you open the damn door and say come in, come in!
‘How long will your son’s friend stay?’ Asked my wife.
‘Well, that’s just it. We still don’t really have any idea and it all happened so fast. We know almost all of Pete’s friends, but we’ve never seen this young man. Remember, Pete worked at the vineyard and met people who just drifted through for the harvest. Maybe that’s where this one is from.’ Betsy couldn’t hide that she was still sorting it all out.
It was Sylvia who brought up their seventeen-year-old daughter, Leanne.
‘Oh god I haven’t even thought of that! Al, what in the world are we going to do? What’s Leanne going to say when she gets home from work? This is gonna drive me crazy, I swear.’ Betsy said suddenly again on the verge of tears.
Betsy felt trapped. ‘There’s just no way you and I are going to work every day for ten hours and have Leanne in that house stuck with that desperate drunk man Al. He has a missing tooth and near the top of his head he’s lost some hair like he’s got something! Her shifts at retail change every day, sometimes they call off her day.’
My wandering thoughts took me to a time back when I was just past thirty years old on a sales trip. I can’t recall specific time and details, seems like maybe a Bob Evans breakfast stop. In a booth I was passing on my way to my seat was a family of four, Mommy and Daddy, little five-year-old bro and a drop dead gorgeous, high school age daughter.
She was at that happy and exciting point in her flowering age where she literally and coyly watched every passing humans’ reaction to her as they walked by. It boils down to the way god made us. Get this. ‘Humans’ reaction’ means she wanted you to notice her, her recently self-discovered shining nubile beauty, her tight sweater that intentionally stretched across ridiculously perky breasts.
A short, pleated cheer leader’s type skirt showing the finest thighs at that moment on the entire planet.
I immediately felt ashamed after being engulfed in that old smoldering lower tumescence I’d felt all my life around wonders of the opposite sex.
Her bright baby blue eyes scanning every passing male to see. To see what reaction, she might stir.
This all translates to at the very least, trouble, or at worst ‘deadly’. Watching the impact she caused, no doubt gave her a sense of measure of herself as a budding woman. Gave her an idea where she stood in that classic line up talked about in thousands of rock and roll songs written of the ‘new girl…’
Oh, come on, it’s all over the place, some classic tunes come to mind immediately: Tom Petty’s, ‘here comes my girl’ when he drawls; ‘watch her walk…’ or the classic: ‘…she wore an itsy bitsy, teeny weeny…’, or The Doors: ‘don’t you love her as she’s walkin out the door?’ it goes on and on. What it’s all about in the mind of countless girls coming of age.
My mind just sort of freely roamed, like an eagle over the chaparral covered desert. Then it occurred to me that perhaps these pills disqualified me as our meditation group’s leader. They had voted for me as the main meditation guide, more than likely the result of having read more on the matter than the others.
I was quite conversant on the subject. You know, so is this new wonderful floating sense, this whole Native American thing like feather dream catchers and sun-bleached buffalo skulls blended in, like green turquoise shaman stuff even, mean that my very Buddhist like equanimity manner was all bullshit?
It was starting to feel that way.
If so, I’d have to resign from my group leader position in my meditation circle? But there must be a natural way found in desert plants, near the cactuses around here that don’t…
‘Hey! Hey Mike! Jesus. There you go again! C’mon, hon, you’re going to have to ease up on that stuff. Are you sure you’re not overdoing it? I’m not gonna deal with that, no way.’ For some damn reason, Sylvia was frantically waving her hands right in front of my face.
‘Whoa! What’s up, babe? You’re going to have to stop that. She’s been doing that more and more, about driving me nuts too. Well, I suppose after the new pills. So, what are you saying?’ Sylvia looked at me with a surprised look on her face, one that said ‘you are acting strange…’
Betsy was crying softly. ‘Oh God Al, what are we going to do now? Any ideas? We need them now.’
Al was watching me now with an un heretofore seen curiosity, and we’d spent lots of time together camping and fishing, hunting quail, searching for nuggets and rattlers in the desert, you name it.
‘Those meds you’re taking, Mike; better be careful, man. You never can trust what sort of stuff they’re giving you.’
‘We don’t have to like it and it may even be you’re already deciding whether to judge me unkindly. Like: what sort of nut bag is Al becoming? Oh well, certainly not my intention. Here’s what I feel you guys have to do. You’re just have to get this guy out, that’s all.’
We all sat silent after I said that, as if there was no other solution, which there wasn’t. I added. ‘Hey Al and Betsy, I’ll be happy to help get him out if it’s necessary, but I doubt it will.’
Silence returned, and we sat, Betsy sniffles tying us as one. My thoughts turned inward again.
Yes, the planet is crawling full of sick people. If you don’t handle the situation, then the situation will handle you, as my dear Irish grandmother always used to say.
‘Nope, Al’s right, this just isn’t going to work.’ Betsy could no longer stand it. ‘Al, you call and tell that son of yours that as soon as we get home, that guy goes. You just think of our daughter there alone with him all day. I don’t care one whit that he needs help, he’s not getting it from us. You hearing me, Al?!’
Oddly I felt a sense of redemption, maybe more a recovery. My wife was watching me.
Al nodded in agreement as she was still talking and was already pulling out his cell to call their son after Betsy finished talking.
Sylvia still watched me then distractedly said, quiet like; ‘Hey you all, how about some French toast? I was just about to make some…’
