It’s Okay That You’re Here
In Phoenix, AZ
I’m staying with my mother, Nannette, in her rented home in Phoenix, AZ. She shares the house with her boyfriend (Theodore, affectionately called Ted), a cat, and a pack of wild javelina that come and look through our windows long before the sun has put much energy into getting off the horizon. They’re hungry, and in their strong, silent-type way, let us know that they’re going to raise all hell until we do something about it.
Shouldering a sack of bird seed, Ted slips out through the kitchen’s sliding glass door and begins filling the dog bowls we keep scattered around the yard with oats, corn, and barley. This “yard” is really a swatch of desert, hilly and canyoned, that eventually turns into a golf course after some 100 meters of unbroken run. It’s hard to tell who’s more skittesh––man or animal, as one wades in amongst the others like a beach comber at low tide. Ted stays his course however, and after some two minutes is done. Turning homewards, he escapes back to our civilized company.
It goes without saying that I stay mostly put. I do my work at the kitchen table, savoring a bowl of pinto beans, while Ted stands on the back porch nursing a covert cigarette my mother will no doubt not see but later come to suspect. Beyond him, the acres of green golf course shimmer like the pelt of a terrifically well-nourished animal. Pausing, I look up and out. I’ve been here since the 26th of December, and am really beginning to question what I’m doing. It’s the 2nd of January now as I write this. Shouldn’t I be getting back to Brooklyn.
Spending time here, as I’ve done, without anything to occupy myself besides cooking, thinking, walking, teaching myself Spanish in the tub, and talking with my mother more often than I otherwise thought possible, has done a number on my old routines. And as these old perspectives have fallen away, and even as I acknowledge the unreality & impermanence of the new ones growing-up from my state of limbo, I catch glimpses of the work this limbo is doing on me. Slow work. Perhaps work I wouldn’t be still enough to otherwise notice.
I’ve been attempting meditation,
as I’ve mentioned, thinking it might help bring my mind into sync with the pace of things here, and in doing so, into greater clarity. In
all honesty however, I’m terrible at it. During my 15 minutes of lotus-ed silence this morning on the living room carpet, I decide half a dozen times to change the direction of my career. And yet, tomorrow we’ll
see with that austere severity afforded only by the passage of time, what changes, if any, have survived on the
ever-present backdrop of desert sun. Phoenix is a petri dish, and we’re
seeing what ideas will grow here.And as these ideas either do or don’t, I eat. I’ve stopped reading during meals, or worse, watching YouTube, as I’ve made a point of actually trying to taste this breakfast before me, now that it’s 11:15am and I finally have the green light.
And sometimes I have company. In the latter half of this morning, I look at
my mother’s hands while she picks up her spoon.
I look into her face, her eyes, as she speaks. I hear what she’s saying, or trying to say,
as she picks back over her words like a hiker who’s lost the contour of a
trail. And mostly, I realize, it’s okay
that I’m here. Life is long, and it’s sometimes
important to feel that.D.C. 1/07/23