Helen was always good at nest-building, as I recall.

This came in handy, because as I once figured out, we went through over 40 moves before I graduated from high school. Many of those were within the same community, of course. Arriving in Abilene, Texas for instance, we lived for a time in a motel with a kitchenette, then a rental house in the middle of town. I went to Lincoln Junior High School and had the requisite school jacket. After a while, we moved onto the air base for a while. When Helen decided the house was too small, my parents bought a brick rancher in a new subdivision on the edge of town. (I then attended Jefferson Jr. High and couldn’t wear my jacket.) That was where we stayed the longest — with me now at Cooper Jr./Sr. High School — until at last they sold it just before our move to Massapequa, New York (!). What with one delay after another, we then had to make another rented house our home for almost six months before finally leaving town. If you haven’t been keeping count, that adds up to five moves in less than four years!

Helen’s residence until a long month ago was the place I knew as the “family home” in Tucson. She’d lived there for over twenty years alone and outfitted it very nicely for a desert double-wide. It’s where I stayed this time and will likely stay again, when I come back to sign papers and dispose of everything. (IF I come back, I should say. More on that later.) The place has got to be one of the best-landscaped and situated properties in Tucson Estates, the so-called mobile home community for residents over 55 on the southwest edge of town. It’s adjacent to an arroyo where coyotes and javelinas go. There are mature trees and garden areas with a large paved patio. You can sit in a big screened porch and watch the doves and hummingbirds. Inside, it’s filled with Helen’s paintings and many beautiful keepsakes. The carpeting is plush and soft. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. There’s also a big carport and a separate art studio.

A recurring theme in Helen’s last few years, however, was how she hated the responsibility of maintaining the place and yearned for a smaller, simpler home. On the face of it, this sounded sane to me. It was easy to imagine being 86 years old and not wanting to worry about the plumbing. The trouble was, practical concerns like that weren’t on her mind. She either couldn’t stand to simply let things be or couldn’t face the crisis of making choices and wanted somebody else to “take care of things.” This would invariably be one of us five siblings, and earlier this year she’d again floated the absurdist fantasy that my wife and I should take over the old place and be neighbors with her in Tucson Estates. In typical fashion, however, the thrust of this offer was that I would never be able to obtain a nicer home for us, being an artistic ne’er-do-well, and that my wife deserved far better than my forcing her to live in Taos. (Always the carrot and the baseball bat, together.)

In any case, I never figured she would do it. How can an 86-year-old woman take that kind of disruption in her life? But if she did, I knew or hoped that I could count on her to buy something decent. She’d actually pulled this stunt once before, a few years back, and eventually been convinced by sister M____ and others to move back to the double-wide. What I mean is, I just assumed she’d learned her lesson. Extremely naive on my part, for sure. I also think one sometimes manufactures hope to cover up the pain.

But she did it, and she did it badly. Very badly indeed. For one thing, she paid way too much and wasted precious cash for something she didn’t need. (My gently pointing this out resulted in my being attacked for never supporting her decisions.) For another, well, let’s start with a look at the old residence:

Old house: large screened porch

This is where you want to be except when it’s god-awful hot. From here you can watch the birds and look at your gardens. There’s tons of room and comfortable chaise lounges that are easy to nap on. I love it out there. The evening sun sets on the other side of the house, too, so it’s cooler here. Now contrast this with the screened porch on the “new” trailer Helen moved into a few weeks ago:

New house: narrow, hot, and ugly

Yes, that’s an apartment-sized washer & dryer in the background — Helen wets the bed every now and then, and that machine is too small to wash her blankets. (There are big, matched Maytag machines back at the old place.) This porch is much narrower and looks out on the side of the single-wide next door. What’s more, it’s on the sunny side of the house! In Arizona, that can be a death sentence. No one will ever want to sit out here.

Old house: just part of the landscaping

The shot above shows a little of the outdoor space beside the screened porch at the previous residence. Why give up what had always been a source of comfort and joy? The plantings and nearby wildlife almost made staying at Helen’s bearable, in fact.

Old house: carport, arroyo to the right

Helen’s studio is at the back. The steps to the house are specially-built, wide and shallow, easy for old legs to manage. The trees are full of birds all day. But take a look at this shot of where she lives now:

New house: rear of carport

That’s it, that’s all there is. The view isn’t a fair comparison, but you get the idea. This carport isn’t wide enough for the Chevy Cobalt I rented, and the steps to the kitchen door [not shown] are narrow and steep.

The sink in the tiny kitchen of the new place isn’t big enough to hold a frying pan, and there isn’t any dishwasher like Helen had before. The “bottom shelf” in the lower cabinets is the floor itself, and the counters all have very sharp edges. Dark brown fake wood paneling is everywhere. The previous owner’s dishes are still in the cupboards, and she uses them. I could go on and on and on: the bathroom in her old place was custom-designed with a soaking tub for old folks, special handholds and all. There’s even a walk-in closet. In the new place, the bathroom is so small that if someone were on the toilet when you opened the door, you’d hit them on the knee. The bathtub is horrible and slippery — Helen can only sit in a chair and take a sponge bath. There’s hardly any storage space at all.

This, however, is perhaps most telling of all:

New house: view across the road

Okay, ready now? The following is what it looks like across the street from the OLD house!

A little light in hell

My photos don’t necessarily convey the real differences, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The thing is, it’s just not like her, not like the woman who decorated the old place. No gardens to enjoy, no views, no birds or animals to watch, no porch to sit on. No beauty whatsoever, and someone else’s pictures are still on the walls. The new trailer is narrow, leaky, damp, and dark. My God, I realized: just like a grave!

It makes a kind of sense, this living death, but it’s very hard to take and very stupid. Helen needs live-in care, at least, and in the old home there were extra bedrooms where someone could easily have lived with her. Not so here! What’s more, the old woman paid cash for this, at least $50,000, money she could have used to pay for care. That would make it a tragedy, except that this is Helen’s chronicle. As we shall see, the last move of her life is actually her chosen way to die, as if she had no one to care for her and there were no other choice.

So be it, then, and on with the show.

I hardly know how to begin, but I have to try, in order to save myself.

Those of you who have gone through something similar will understand at least a little, or maybe a lot. We’re all the same and yet so different. It’s one thing to say, “My mother has been diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s.” [Note: diagnosis not official after all. - JHF] It’s quite another thing to say that this has happened to Helen Farr. That makes this the Helen & Johnny Chronicles as well, of course, and only I can tell the story of what’s going on now with both of us.

The one who gave me birth

Sobbing in the carport of this stupid, stinking trailer, completely broken, swatting bugs and staggering, trapped here now in the hell-hole that is Tucson. Why does anybody live here? I can’t imagine. Unbearable, putrid heat all day and night, humid too, this time of year, with millions of mosquitoes in the goddamned desert. If ever a city deserved to die, this one does. It shouldn’t even exist, running on water that fell as rain back in the Pleistocene. But why am I talking about Tucson? What’s this place ever done to me??

I freely admit that my Tucson experience has always been colored by the hell of familial disfunction. I could tell you about the time my father was drunk, crying, and threatening violence as my wife and I were leaving, both parents wielding knives and screaming… so we took my mother with us to a McDonald’s on the outskirts of town. We all shared cardboard burgers we couldn’t taste and then my wife and I drove off, leaving my mother to wait long enough for the old man to pass out so she could call a taxi. But oh, there was so much more. There is so much more.

My father died back in the ’80s from lung cancer at age 67, not long after he told me, shaking with rage, that “No one knows what goddamned hell it’s been to live with that woman!” This isn’t a preface to an indictment of my mother, but rather to show the ground in which the current catastrophe has grown. Not from which, but in which — the larger tale is steeped in karmic mystery, of course. I can tell you what I know of what’s happened in my lifetime that relates, and perhaps I will, if I am able. Years of Jungian analysis has taught me how to shine a light into the catacombs where I’m always anchored, though my eyes are in the sky.

The present disaster has many layers, twists, and turns, which makes a linear narrative quite difficult. And always there’s the context, the heaving, painful, hideous tapestry of lies and idiocy, greed and nonsense, drenched in tears and blood. Yes, blood. You might not see it, but it’s there. So maybe some will understand when I say that when I heard that Helen was in the hospital with pneumonia and that my brother and sister needed me to come, I heard the banshees wail.

South of Socorro, on the way to Arizona

She’s sitting 15 feet away now as I write this, at least as lucid as she was when I was last here almost two years ago. Her dementia (or whatever it is) phases in and out, like the moon moving behind the clouds. Earlier today she all but needed physical restraint, but dementia is easier to deal with than the periods of so-called sanity. I live in dread of those right now, because I’ve already started taking over all the finances, and in this state she might remember. I’ve gathered up the credit cards and checkbooks, taken control of various accounts through power of attorney vested in me years ago if this should come to pass. I wonder if she knows she agreed to this just last Friday, at her bank. Please God, don’t let her ask about it now: I can’t take another fit of screaming.

She hears voices almost all the time. A common theme is sex and dope parties at the neighbors, late at night, people voting for her and against her, whisperings in the dark. An hour ago she came out from the bedroom and wanted to know who that woman was I’d been talking to. I told her I’d been sitting here at my computer the whole time, totally alone. We’ve actually “discussed” the idea of a nursing home, easier when she’s in a weakened state from which acquiescence almost flows. She doesn’t think it’s time, of course, but then she thinks I’m here just visiting. JUST VISITING??? I’ve cried for days, not knowing what to do or where to turn, and she has no idea. I’d say it’s more than I can bear, except I seem to still be here, where I would never want to be.

The pneumonia almost killed her and left her with a concrete-hard mass of congealed pus outside her lungs, restricting their expansion. My sister (a nurse) came out from California to oversee the situation, discussed this with my mother, and both agreed there’d be no major surgery to correct it. No extraordinary measures, no derring-do, let nature take its course, etc. At the same time, my sister, overcome with guilt, decided she would quit her job in LA to stay here and take care of mom — a position she’d only recently gotten after earning her nursing degree at the age of 50. With this decision in her mind, she allowed the hospital to release Helen for home care, thinking that she and my brother could manage the daily injections of antibiotics into the kick-line (IV) that Helen would need for several weeks more. That’s not the end of this installment, though.

While this was going on, I was on my way to Tucson in a rental car, straining against the loss of every mile that brought me closer to the vortex. It was like driving through giant thunderstorms of pain, and when I hit the Arizona line, I slowed down, knowing… Rolling into Tucson at midnight and 92 degrees, I headed for Helen’s other trailer, the luxurious double-wide she’d recently abandoned for the awful place she lives in now — this requires a separate episode — where I could camp out in the wreckage of my mother’s life and get some rest before heading over in the morning. While I was still asleep the next morning, my cell phone rang. It was my wife in Taos, who’d gotten up early and read the email from my sister:

“Sweetie, I know youre not up yet, but I wanted you to know: M____ has gone back to Los Angeles!”

Oh really? Oh God.

I didn’t have to know the reason, though. The context, remember. Always the context. Of course, she’d seen that everything was impossible, never mind her best intentions. Not only was Helen raving mad and vicious when she wasn’t, but my sister had realized she couldn’t quit her job and lose her health insurance, since she’d just had surgery for thyroid cancer and needed radiation treatments. No money would be forthcoming from Helen, either, since the dispensing of funds is always tied to coercion in the name of “doing what’s best.” No hope of getting compensation for giving up her life to stay here, then, assuming she could stand it.

I walked in the door and found Helen sitting in her chair, seemingly completely out of it. I bent down to give her a hug. She knew who I was, but not that I had come from Taos. The morning did not go swimmingly. She obviously couldn’t be left alone and yet there wasn’t anyone to take care of her. No one person can, certainly not my brother. Not me, not my sister, either. No one to take care of her, and what to do? Now everything was up to me, and here I sit, almost a full week later, Helen babbling constantly through the entire writing of this post.

Babble, babble, babble, each absurdity inviting an exasperated response I dare not utter.

I took her to a doctor on Friday (as soon as I could manage it), hoping to get some help, but he wasn’t her “primary care physician,” who wasn’t available anyway, so the idiot could do nothing except tell me to take Helen to the emergency room and leave her there. That’s right: ABANDON MY MOTHER at the hospital door and walk away! This advice came from a doctor,, and he’s not the only one who told me so.

This is America in 2008. This is what we have to answer for, all of us, and I’m white-hot with rage.

Thanks to everyone who’s left a message or sent me one!

Yes, it’s here, the actual calendar anniversary of my birth long ago in the wartime summer of 1945 in Bryan, Texas, YE GODS!!! And here’s a picture of me (look hard) with my mother, pretty young Helen Masson from Middle River, MD, taken a short while before my unveiling as first-born son. Take a good long look: this is the woman who’s now 86 years old, lying in a hospital bed in Tucson with her pneumonia-ravaged lungs filling up with fluid and only two days ago diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s — and I’m in there somewhere:

WWII is winding down…

And this is me, 3.5 weeks after popping out. Doesn’t look like I’m all that glad to be here, does it? Maybe it’s the fact of being born on Nagasaki Day… I tried to find an early picture of me smiling and drooling, but they don’t show up until a few months later. Guess I was really pissed.

That is one powerful set of brows

Finally, just because it’s my birthday, I want to play some music for you. You have to click on it, though. This is my new god, Slim Doucial, one of the forerunners of what we call Cajun music today, recorded back in the late 1920’s. Listen carefully! There’s a washtub bass in there, I swear, though it might just be a wonky low string on the guitar. The song is “Chere Yeux Noirs (Dear Black Eyes),” and I think it’s positively transcendental.

[audio:Slim_Doucet_Chere_Yeux_Noirs.mp3]

Probably only Leos broadcast their birthdays in advance. No, not to get presents or put on airs — Leos don’t have to — but because they feel free to do so. It’s natural. The last thing my wife would do, or would have done even many years ago, is talk up her birthday, except privately to intimates. Not me! On the other hand…

Nagasaki

Today is Hiroshima Day, and I was born on August 9th, the day we dropped the second a-bomb on Nagasaki. The actual day, not the anniversary. That’s always felt significant to me, although there had to have been many thousands of other people born that day all over the world. (I wonder how we’re doing?)

I take my birthdays very seriously. They’re like portals, you know. Because of that, while I sometimes like to get raucous, I generally try to think of something personally important to do on those days, as opposed to merely seeking entertainment. Not that I have anything against a blow-out party, nosirree, it’s just that some of the best things happen in the all-alone. That may make me one weird Leo [see above], but that’s the way it goes.

This might be the year I climb a mountain, or go up as far as I can get. I might even spend the night out there. My wife actually suggested that, which shows how much she’d like a little peace and quiet. I have minimal Wal-Mart dilettante outdoor equipment, which is to say cheap shoes, ordinary clothes, a decent backpack, a couple of water bottles, and not much sense. I’m also not in shape, but then how many of my contemporaries are even standing? Besides, it’s part of the transcendental experience, what with sweating off 10 pounds and over-stressing every joint. And the long hot bath after I come home is to die for, irony intended.

How cold could it be this time of year at 11,000 feet, anyway?

That’s what she called him, “Lumpy.”

For the two or three people in the whole world who might understand what I’m talking about, that’s what yet another Maryland friend emailed me when I told her who had died on Wednesday. I didn’t even know he had a nickname, but then she might have gone to high school with him, and of course I didn’t, having moved there back in ‘75. Lumpy? I knew him as Jay.

The news is part of a larger medicine show. It’s strange, the effect it’s all having on me… as if I’m actually a member of the human race. A long time coming too, because growing up an Air Force brat with over 40 changes of residence when I was a kid is like being cast in iron. During my school years, I never had a friend for more than a few months at a time, so I guess I never really knew what other folks considered normal. I always had to just let everybody go.

For the last nine years in Taos, I’ve had to look at every unpatched hole and all the scary monsters. It’s taken me all this time to stop walking around with the old landscapes in my head, too. It was as if the past might grab me if I weren’t careful, pull me back and mangle my soul. I haven’t exactly been pining for old scenes of late, but there was always this self-doubting incompleteness that made me wonder. Guilt, actually, I realize.

Hearing about Lumpy is part of what makes me feel connected today, and yet that also frees me. I didn’t expect that! It’s as if acknowledging my past also means I don’t “have” to go back. I feel a circle’s been completed, like everything’s OK, like I just gave myself permission to truly get on with living where I am.

Can you believe it took nine years?

Exhibit A: a photograph of me in Maryland from 1977. A very fine photographer friend of mine was cleaning out his archives and sent me this while I was in Santa Fe having fish & chips with the women in the previous post. I already knew one of them when Ed took that picture, and it wasn’t my wife! Bought that guitar from her husband, too.

Hey, I remember that shirt!

And NOW, we march!!!

I hadn’t seen her in about eight years, or was it nine?

There was some nervousness on my part at first, having to do with simply meeting someone from our old life. It wasn’t me or her I was concerned with, however, but my wife. At least I thought it had to do with her. As is most often the case, the issues are much closer to home.

There’s always been this sadness in me that what I love will surely be taken from me, even love itself. I know where this comes from now and grow my own, so to speak, but it’s been a long, hard slog through the valley of man-I-sure-fucked-up-my-life-again to reach this relative equanimity and finally-expanding joy. Most days “joyous” doesn’t fairly describe me [cough], but I’m getting there, in millimeters. Today I felt a bigger jump, as if something empowering had come to light.

My wife has had her issues with New Mexico that in my occasional terrors grow to be the things that send her back where we came from. Tonight at dinner, for example, when our old friend said she loved New Mexico and envied us for living here, my sweetie muttered, “Don’t!” Just the kind of thing to push my buttons in the past, though probably more revealing of anxiety over temporary circumstances than anything else. So even though I’ve left this all behind me, hohoho, I must have wondered if what we’d hear from back East would give my sweetie fits. Or me, for that matter.

But what useless nonsense! It was wonderful to see our friend, whom my wife immediately implored to tell her “what’s happened to everybody.” Not surprisingly, what’s happened is simply life. Most everyone is doing fine, and some are hurting. A fellow I knew in Chestertown — younger than I am, incidentally — died yesterday, in fact. It wasn’t hard to listen to at all, either, this human saga that we’d had a role in. It made me feel validated in a whole new way. I also think I needed to hear all this to see that once and for all, I wasn’t threatened, and that I had done the right thing by following my heart, as if anything else had ever been possible anyway.

This probably isn’t very clear. But I saw our old friend as closer to me as a person, somehow. More related, human-to-human. I like that. How very odd to feel all right. We could all use more of this.

So thank you, M., for all of this and more, and have a safe flight home. (You’re also the only one who might understand the title of this post, so I’ll be sending all the questions off to you.)

And now, we MARCH!!!

Oh man, Bo Diddley died today, and I’m sitting here with tears running down my face. What joy that man brought into this world. I finally got to hear him play in Santa Fe, back in January of ‘04, and wrote about it in one of my old GRACK! columns that I later developed into a full-length article for Horse Fly. What follows is that longer piece, by way of tribute.

Here’s to you, Bo: may you keep on rockin’ through those pearly gates…

Bad Seed Blessing
by John H. Farr

Bo Diddley at the Lensic?

I was broke and might die tomorrow, but no way was St. Peter gonna wave me through that gate if I didn’t grab a credit card and go: “You say you passed up your last chance to see Bo Diddley in person? GIT ON OUTA HERE!” So that was that.

At the very last minute, the Ford wouldn’t start. No buzz, no click, no nothin’. The last time this had happened, I was halfway across Cebolla Mesa. That time I’d gotten the juice flowing in the F-150 by banging on the battery posts with a wrench, so I tried it again and got the cab light to come on. This showed me I was on the right track, so I took off the cables and gave everything a scrub with a wire brush. When I refastened the clamps, I knew it would start. It did, and off I flew.

Getting from Llano to downtown Santa Fe in a little over an hour is possible, but it ain’t pretty. Once there, I took a quick walk to clear my head and then hurried to take my seat. Right away I recognized Bo’s famous custom-built “square” guitar resting on a chair. That also meant he’d be sitting down, old blues-man-style, but hey, the guy was 75.

Bo Diddley’s guitar, photographed at intermission

As it turned out, someone forgot to tell him. My boyhood idol came out and played for almost two and one-half hours straight, no breaks, accompanied by the very capable Alex Maryol Band, who’d opened for him as well. Bo played the old songs, some blues, even a rap number I swear he made up on the spot. He was loose and he was happy. “You got my back, right?” he’d say off-mike to Alex, then hit the special effects built into his guitar and take off into uncharted musical space, laughing all the way.

It wasn’t so much the music as the man himself that had me reeling through one wave of emotion after another. Twice I found myself all choked up and wondering why. Whatever it was that went through the heart and soul of the 10-year-old boy who first heard Bo Diddley on Armed Forces Radio in Germany in 1955 was special, all right. If I could put it in a bottle or a book, it would save the world. When he finally announced his last number and launched into a classic Diddley romp with his signature beat, I didn’t want the feeling to end. It didn’t, either.

Without explanation or intro, Bo changed his mind and jumped right into “Bad Seed,” a song about going through life his own special way and nobody else’s. In between verses he asked all the “bad seeds” in the audience to stand up, and some of them did. I was trying to take a picture and stayed in my seat. I already knew who I was, anyway.

On the way home I stopped at a Pojoaque mini-mart that was just about to close, nobody there but me and the law. My hair was flying in the breeze as I swung down out of the cab. Inside, I felt the tribal cops’ eyes on me as I put too much fake cheese on a cold hot dog and fumbled with the foam cup for my coffee. Shades of times past! Climbing back into the truck, I just had to smile: Man, do you think I’d look like this if I was holding?

All the way back, I never saw another car until I’d climbed out of the canyon. The three elk standing by the side of the road just past the Horseshoe let me pass but woke me up good, so I slid into Llano and played my electric guitar until four in the morning. I don’t think the landlord heard me.

He’s real polite though, and probably wouldn’t say.

I took other pictures at that concert, most of which didn’t turn out so well. This is the best one I have of Bo. It captures a certain energy, but of course you had to be there — and now none of us can anymore:

The one and only Bo

I want to write about the heart. I can’t possibly finish this in a blog post, but I want to start.

Today I know that now, right now, is the beginning of the rest of my life, on which there are no limits. The “secret” is being true to myself, the fact of which I’m only beginning to feel. True to my true nature, I should say, in the context of a calm, slowly building joy and union with with all Creation. This isn’t an intellectual exercise. The locus is the natural world.

I grew up with a thousand reasons to be unhappy. In my case, it’s partly psycho-genetic. My granddad used to take the train from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia for a day to visit art museums. My grandmother, daughter of a “shoutin’ Methodist” circuit riding preacher in West Virginia, wouldn’t hear of it. “What’s the point of that,” she’d reprimand him, “there’s nothing there but pictures on a wall!” — but he’d go anyway. I never really got to know him — he died while we were overseas and I was 10 years old — and I wish I had. I’d like to ask him what he felt about those paintings and what they meant to him, since there was not a stick of anything you’d call art in Granny’s house when I came back to Chestertown as a grownup.

One day Granny gave me her father’s saddlebags, however. That’s right, my great-grandfather used to ride a mule to a different church every Sunday, before he landed a regular parish gig in his later years. I kept those saddlebags for a long time, until my aunt in Maine asked for them back, a typical Farr family manuever. That was only a few years ago, mind you, and though I deeply resented her asking, I realized the only way to avoid more injury to myself was to send them back immediately, along with every other family artifact in my possession. I had quite a collection, too. I’d come to sense that these things were actually poisonous, although sometime in the late ’80s I’d exorcised the saddlebags by taking them to my great-grandfather’s grave in Parsons, West Virginia and smoking a pipeful of dope, exhaling over his tombstone. She doesn’t know that and probably never will — shortly after I sent the musty relics back to Vassalboro, she walked out of her house and tripped, hitting her head on a rock, and hasn’t been the same since.

They can’t hurt me any more, I can only hurt myself (as I was taught to do). Hurt follows hurt, and love follows love.

I give myself permission to be. The sound you hear is singing in the blood.

It’s easy to tell when things need examining. I lose my bearings, I bleed, and fall completely under the power of buried knots of energy. Maybe I should call them clots, because they stifle the circulation of love.

Today, for example, when compulsive reading of blogs was like squatting naked in a vat of acid, I was tearing myself to shreds over not finding a house for us. Absurd on both counts, but there it was, only why? Out of the miasma floated a clue in the process of recalling an unloving aunt back East who very nearly did me in a few years ago. The curse of my family is a total lack of empathy, which describes her perfectly. Though well into her 90s, she’ll never die, like Dracula. When her brothers were alive, the three of them together could suck all the joy out of the air. On hideously hot, humid summer days in my grandmother’s house, when even the wooden floorboards would burn your bare feet, they’d sit silently in the living room with the fan blowing, waiting for something to criticize. If I was lucky, there’d be somewhere to go outside and play, if I could stand it. (In the 1950s, we called this the American Dream.)

And to think, to this day, that my old friends in Maryland still don’t get why I left the scene of the crime! Well, maybe some do — I can think of a couple — but most of them don’t, I’m sure. How could they? No one talked about such things, and 10 years ago, I didn’t really know why myself, only that I had to get the hell out. The family connection was just a part of it, of course, but a vital one, and even the cornfields stinking of plant sperm under white August skies must have reminded me of it on some deeper level.

The utterly different surroundings of northern New Mexico were a good place to come. Crucifixions abound, bloody Jesuses everywhere, darkness and light in a landscape of giants. The opening here is Spirit — universal replacement parts! — though not without a lot of work. (This little essay is one of the tasks.)

Springtime in the Rockies, this very day

This morning I angered my wife, who kept her tongue fastened, refusing to argue. She knows full well when I’ve entered the ancestral zone: the lifeless monotone and reluctance to speak, the stumbling around for someone to blame. Distance means nothing. She feels it from light-years away but refuses to be caught, 90 pounds of empathic fury in self-protection mode.

This afternoon she went to the grocery store. I mumbled a greeting when she returned and helped unload the car. When I went back to my desk, there was a decorated envelope with my name on it. Inside was a beautiful card with the inscription, “You are a very special part of my universe.” Underneath she had written:

“I love you no matter what!”

It was signed with a little heart and her initials. I cracked. Later, after dinner, I climbed down from the cross.

That is how this works, so never be afraid to go there.