Trigo Road family, forty years later, Camino Cielo, 2014.
Oh, serve me right to suffer
Hey, hey, serve me right to be alone
Serve me right to be alone
‘Cause I’m still livin’ with a memory
Of the days that’s passed and gone The days that’s passed and gone– Percy Mayfield 1964
I practice letting go of the past. I am not great at it, but I continue. My brain’s tendency is to cling to the past for safety or revision or validation, taking Mulligans on my worst follies, replaying my fanciful heroics, leaving aside the squirmy bits. So, I come back to the present moment, over and over again. My work is not to obliterate or deny my past. And I surely don’t wish to forget it, to create a kind of tabula rasa of my mind. I simply don’t wish to give it the authority to make my choices for me.
I do the same with those events yet to occur, but that is a different telling.
I choose to try to live in that space between before and after.
But that’s not to say I don’t enjoy playing with my memories. As I age, I find that I go back there and bring forward old stories, writing down what I can recall, putting the mnemonic building blocks together in creative ways, with a somewhat fungible loyalty to historical accuracy. I’m a human, not an historian, so my interest is more in how it feels or felt than if my telling would satisfy a polygraph.
I cannot imagine how I would feel if I could no longer remember, either the pleasant or the cringe-worthy. I suppose I am taking having reliable recall for granted, even as it wears thin.
My Mom forgot, altogether. Three decades ago, this tiny, strong-willed, Irish schoolteacher set out to drive solo from Washington state to Fort Collins, Colorado for her fiftieth college graduation reunion. She was the age I am now. This was not unusual as the entire clan were a flock of migratory Mics who regularly crossed the country in 1940’s and 1950’s Chevvies. But she’d been having memory issues. No one stopped her but I insisted she have my contact at hand. I got a call from the Provo, Utah cops. She’d strayed off course by fifty miles and had parked outside an abandoned steel mill in the middle of the night. “Just waiting for my brother to come out then we’ll be on our way, officer.” They locked her up for her own safety.
I remember well. I flew in, got a lift to Provo, got her out of the hoosegow, and drove two days back to Washington as she hallucinated and had psychedelic conversations with ghosts. My brother and I took over and he managed her life from then on, as Alzheimer’s robbed her of her memories, her personality, and her ability to be the independent, feisty, road-trippin’ leprechaun she’d always been.
I told this story then, giving my Mom a voice she could not muster, feeling into how she must have felt, something I could not know but took liberty with. Her life changed in an instant, as it will for us all, and she released her grip on everything, not her first choice. I titled my piece “They Took Away My Car”, which I did, driving away from her, 1,200 miles back to California. She died a few years later. Sometimes a car is not just a car.
I spoke with one of my dearest friends yesterday, who I will call Alex. He‘s been experiencing memory loss and is now using the Alzheimer’s term. He’s a year older than me and we’ve known each other fifty years, having met when I lived in a semi-communal household of students and surfers and those of us yet to find a calling. Alex lived two blocks away, closer to the beach, but was a part of our larger family. Alex was a refugee from the east, living on unemployment, regaling us with tales of seeing Springsteen in bars in Red Bank, New Jersey. I had a marginal part-time job and was a poor University of California student. We mostly spent our days on the beach, body-surfing the Isla Vista shore break.
Alex was well read, carefully spoken, philosophical in the Castaneda way many of us were then, intellectually curious, and disarmingly handsome. That combination attracted companionship while I was most often on the sidelines or the third wheel on the bike.
We each moved on, found careers, got married, had kids, got divorced, remarried. and stayed close over the years. Alex came to my rescue at least once when things were particularly tenuous for me.
Alex was my co-conspirator nearly fifty years ago when we planned to borrow a car and drive to Los Angeles to attend an introductory session at Zen Center, a road trip I did not know at the time would change the course of my life. He didn’t follow me, but I always had someone I could talk with about it.
A year later, I had a rare entrée into the carpenters’ union in Santa Barbara, and invited Alex to join me. He completed the program and went on to earn a good living before donning a three-piece suit and starting his own business. I did not follow him.
More poetry.
We spent a week in the San Rafael Wilderness, naked, sun-burnt, camping among the rocks along the creek, with little more to eat than the bag of mushrooms we brought along, hoping for a Don Juan moment, a short cut to enlightenment. Little did we know. Indeed, how little we knew.
It’s less common for men to easily say “I love you” to one another, without adding “man” at the end, which serves to reassure onlookers of our sexuality. Alex and I don’t require that relief valve. We love each other without qualification.
Alex and I chatted an hour or so yesterday and he was quite comfortable and clear. I told him so and he appreciated that. “It comes and it goes. Some days are better than others.” He’s trying everything he can, with alternative cures, diet and exercise, and our hope is science will arrive at the end of the second reel, just in time, with a potion to slow his demise.
Alex is no longer allowed to drive. His wife must shuttle him about town. That poetic reverberation I was not happy to hear. No one took away his car, just his keys.
Throughout our talk, I leaned on my memories of time we spent together, capers and close calls, telling him stories, with tears covering my face, failing to keep my shit together. Our memories and our shared experience are Alex’s and my equity in a life well lived. We are partners in this project. What happens when he can no longer remember?
Serve me right to be alone.
Sean says
Really enjoyed this read. Thank you for your insightful sharing always!