This Life

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash

I’m on Book 4 of Karl Ove Knaussgard’s six-volume memoir, My Struggle. It’s the best book(s) I’ve read in a long time, and why? It’s hard to say why, and all of the reviewers have said the same thing. It’s not “about” anything. It’s simply the unfolding of a life, the everyday minutiae that makes up a life. This writer misses none of it, and includes all of it, even perching himself from a branch in the forest as a child and crapping off the edge and running down to examine his product. Stuff like that. Stuff you may not dream of writing about. What makes it possible for him to write this way? It’s courageous, but why? It’s simple, it’s the stuff you and I and our neighbors everywhere do. I mean, maybe not all of us have partaken in that particular pleasure, but equally weird things, I am sure. We all have them. Do we think of writing about them? Would we dare? Probably not.

The books aren’t “about” anything. Yet, they wind up being about everything, and being a deep comfort because of it. There is someone on our journey with us, someone who by his very nature and willingness to share, corroborates our experience. We are not so alone. He knits together a world that resonates, a world we can recognize, no matter who we are, I believe. It’s the human experience. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a damn good writer and somehow manages to have me spellbound when “nothing” is happening. He includes walking across the street, swallowing, ordering a cappuccino, the characters in line with him (whom we’ll never see again in the “story”), all observations, and he doesn’t try to make them poetic. He calls it as he sees it. It works. How does it feel to write that way?

It’s getting hot in the house. It’s late June, just after the solstice. Summer is truly here. Morning jazz plays softly in the kitchen where I’m rush-soaking a pot of beans for lunch. Apparently if you forget to soak your beans the night before, you can bring them to a boil, let them rest for an hour, and then begin your recipe. Actually, I just looked that up. You can actually skip all that and just cook them dry, adding half an hour to the cook time. That’s what I’ll do.

Now it’s evening. A whole day has passed. I’m sitting at the faded teak table in the back garden with a perfect negroni. Daisy just pushed her soft, wet snout into my palm. A bird chirps intermittently. The wind is back, after a scorching day yesterday. The breeze from the bay, from the ocean, rustles the needles of the giant silver spruce in the neighbor’s yard beside me. I can hear the wind traveling across the land, as it touches first one tree, then the next. A plane passes overhead, and it’s Sunday night, and an owl, probably perched in one of the old pine trees in the park on the corner, hoots. Traffic hums a few blocks away, but it’s well-insulated by the trees. A child yells. The owl hoots again, and a new pair of birds now chatters with a completely different sound. It falls through the air like confetti. Birds fly into my other neighbor’s grand, elegant Chinese elm, a tree I love, although we have a conflicted relationship, as she is slowly smothering the persimmon tree I planted over my son’s placenta twenty years ago. The tassels in the umbrella above me shimmy, the curtains billow, the roses bob. The air is alive.

I saw my father for lunch today. I brought him pureed cabbage, leek, and potato soup, cooked with a parmesan rind. I brought him sesame bread from the farmer’s market, slathered in Irish butter. I brought him strawberries, splashed with basalmic vinegar and a little superfine sugar, and strewn with spearmint leaves. He was already in the garden with Luigi, who is just Luigi, whom I have just decided in this instant to never call my “ex-” again. He’s not my “ex-”. He’s so much more than that. And as complicated and difficult our relationship has been for twenty-plus years, it is a relationship, and that cannot be denied. He’s not my “ex-” anything. He’s just Luigi. The father of my children. A hallowed position indeed.

With this attitude, it’s no wonder I haven’t found a “new” partner, a “new” mate. How could I? First of all, they wouldn’t be a “mate” at all. Those days are over. I’m 50. (Egads. Still hard to believe.) And I won’t be having any more babies. Luigi is the man I mated with, and together we produced two children we love to the moon and back. And more. Two brilliant, exceptional, and beautiful children.

And there was Luigi, with my dad, in the garden. I parked far away, as is my wont, and strode the 10 or so blocks to the nursing home. I greeted Shahid, the incredibly kind, young, bespectacled Pakistani that works the front desk, the father of a kindergartener, and he — as always — took the time to inquire about my father, my children, myself.

The first few times he did this, I appreciated it and was even touched. I knew it was good, and right. But a part of me was slightly impatient. There was a measured quality to the way he asked about myself, my children, my father that annoyed me slightly — because it took so long. In fact, Shahid took the time to listen. To acknowledge. He gave me the time and room to hear the question. To consider it. To answer in full, if I so chose. And that is an incredible gift indeed. And it took me a year to understand. To understand what Shahid was doing, and why it was valuable. And I knew he didn’t even know that’s what he was doing. It’s just his culture. He comes from an older culture than ours. He comes from a different economic strata, which means he’s more in touch with past mores than we are, or than those of his countrymen who may have attended Harvard are. And it’s valuable, this thing he is in touch with. Exceedingly.

So, I have learned to stop. To listen. To take the time to respond. To notice the slight impatience I feel. To look askance at that. Sink in. Listen. Feel. Notice. Speak. Appreciate. That’s how it goes now with me and Shahid. He’s doing something very old and important. Something we — or at least I (and I suspect others) — aren’t doing much of anymore.

Like Luisa the other day. Luisa, my 80-something year old neighbor who saw me booking down the street on foot (because Medi-Cal doesn’t accept email or fax, can you believe it? and I had to send papers in for my dad, and get them to the mailbox at the end of the street), greeted me from her front garden.

I went to her immediately, out of gratitude but also guilt because I’ve been thinking of her for months (for a year? more?), thinking of how she brought us a loaf of banana bread when we moved into the neighborhood more than 20 years ago. How she used to check in regularly. Send food down the street when she was cleaning out her freezer, how she once gave my daughter a basketful of fabrics when she was learning to sew, a basket that also contained a rose-pink evening gown, polyester and stretchy from the 70s or something, an amazing gown that my daughter at 6? 7? immediately recognized and donned. And donned. And donned. In fact, she wore that dress for years. For years, it dragged behind her like a wedding train. Then it pooled attractively around her feet. Then, it fit her. And it was wondrous throughout. It was beautiful, and she knew it, and it just got more so, year by year by year.

Luigi was seated on a redwood bench beside my dad when I got there. They were in the garden. My father was sitting up straight and dignified. Luigi said, “I pulled him up in the chair. When I got here, he was all laid out the way they do him, in the chair.” My father wore the new Hawaiian shirt I had brought a couple of weeks back. His hair was parted somewhat in the middle, which gives him this kind of 1920s sweetness.

I had brought a picnic — the beans, cooked with onion, bay leaf, and salt at the end. The soup, cooked with a parmesan rind and pureed. The strawberries, luscious as they were. The bread.

I had to get plates and utensils. I gave my dad a slice of the amazing sesame bread from the farmer’s market with some trepidation. I said to Luigi, “Don’t let him choke,” and a mental image and question arose, if he did choke, would Luis be able to save him, help him? I imagined Luis’ fingers down my father’s throat. Doing the Heimlich maneuver. Then, I took off.

I went into the dining room and began looking around. There was a kind of armoire with wine glasses and a few napkin rolls. Two men were seated at a table in the otherwise empty dining room. One said, “Can I help you?” I said, I need plates and silverware. “Oh, we can’t give you those; maybe I can find you something plastic.” No, I said, never mind. I’ll go to skilled nursing and get it from there.

I did just that and returned. My dad was chewing the bread contentedly.

We sat by the fountain for a while, with my dad in dappled shade. But as the wind kicked up, we decided to move to a sunnier and more protected corner of the garden. We found a table with a nice view of the blooming Magnolia Grandiflora, fragrant with creamy blooms the size of dinner plates. I fed my dad some roasted eggplant with yogurt-garlic sauce. He seemed to have a little trouble with the skin. He also didn’t seem all that hungry.

Luis confessed he’d fed my dad some of the slop/non-food food items they serve at that place. I was mad. He saw that. He said, “It was 2 o’clock! He was hungry!” I snapped, “He wasn’t hungry, and besides, it’s okay for him to get a little hungry for real food. I called them Luis! I told them I was coming with lunch!”

“Yeah, but you were late,” he shot back.

We settled down after that. My dad didn’t have much soup either. Nor beans. Nor broccoli. I started him on the strawberries. That perked him up considerably. He made the motion with his hands like he was feeding himself. I presented the whole bowl and let him dip his hand in and fish around for the slippery little buggers. He had to concentrate considerably to clasp one of the strawberry halves swimming in sugary balsamic and get the prize to his mouth, but he succeeded. Several times. In fact, he polished off the whole bowl.

After lunch, we sat comfortably in the breezy sun. Luis (Luigi) had brought down the Jonathan Safran Foer book we’re reading (Everything is Illuminated, which I don’t much like, by the way, and which I can’t imagine my father much likes either, but we remain mired in it for some reason I can’t identify, almost a macabre interest of some sort).

I read a little, but it made even less sense than usual, and I put it down. After that, we sat in companionable silence, a rare thing for Luis and me. After a time, I stood up, walked over to him, and nestled myself in his lap. He put his arms around me, and we sat like that for a few minutes. He said, “That baby girl, how did we make her again?” and I said, “With love.” It was our daughter he was referring to. Our daughter who took nine months to make.

I returned to my dad’s side. I massaged his shoulders, stroked his hair and arms. I spread the table cloth over him as the air grew cooler. Then, he said, “I have a problem.” Which was an amazing feat as he can’t form intelligible sentences anymore for the most part.

I said, “What is your problem, Dad?”

He said, “I don’t know how to get out of this light.”

I said, “Is it too bright for you?” I looked at his eyes, and the slant of the sun.

He said, “No. I don’t know how to get out of this life.”

I was quiet. The earth moved a little.

I took a breath. Released it. Then said, “I guess you’ll just have to trust the process, Dad.”

I looked at Luis. He looked as amazed as I felt, and as moved.