In the Same Family

In the Same Family

After a dark winter, the tendrils of a tentative connection sprout.

It’s testimony to a talent for denial that the mortal decline of a 93-year-old woman could seem sudden. Just last summer, after one of our lunches, Sophie stood at the mailbox waving, as sunny as the patio where we had sat, as ageless as the sun. By September it was unmistakable. I invited her to her favorite Italian restaurant on the circle down from her house, and she didn’t finish her pasta, and barely touched the crème brûlée afterward. She kept repeating herself.

Two weeks later her daughter arrived from Boise and cleaned out the house. In typical fashion Sophie professed, believably, how happy she was to be moving nearer her family, to spend more time with her beloved granddaughter. The woman who loved stocking up on bargains at Grocery Outlet (“Gross Out”), whose garage was a firetrap of orphan furniture and whose dining room was a warren of stacked paper, watched calmly as it was all hauled away. If any thing had been extracted and given specificity, I’m sure she would have argued for a stay in its sentence to the dump. There was plenty I, too, was ready to argue for, but I was not on the scene much. My argument would have been, this should not be happening. As arguments go, a loser.

I emailed several times. Her daughter always answered when I called. Sophie and I had a couple of skeletal conversations. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but I didn’t put it in words. It didn’t bother me that I didn’t. She was always good at reading between the lines. In December I learned, via email, that she died “two weeks ago today, peacefully, surrounded by her loved ones.”

Those bland words were so incongruous—Sophie was vivid above all—but what seemed strangest is that she had died in a nondescript moment of some forgettable day. How could such a light go out of the universe without a sign? There was only silence.

Her death hit me harder than I thought it would. The silence extended, and seemed to concentrate in my house, pressing outward. I reliably go to my garden whenever I am in the dumps and get relief, but the winter garden looked like I felt, with a wet blanket of liquidambar and maple leaves smothering the ferns. I could have removed the leaves but many more still hung on the limbs overhead. Indoors I drank coffee and read book after book, mostly about the Civil War, titles like My Thoughts Be Bloody and The Republic of Suffering. I was captive to the drama of disunion, affected by its contemporary echoes but even more engaged by the stories of the lives of certain prominent characters: Julia Ward Howe, Frederick Douglass, the Grimké sisters, Theodore Weld, John Greenleaf Whittier, Elizabeth Keckley, and Lincoln, of course, most of all. Prior to this winter, I could count the number of books of history I have read on one thumb.

When I could not read another page or endure the melancholy muttering of the refrigerator, I went for walks, usually around twilight, rambles down leaf-sodden streets that stretched deeper into the night as the weeks progressed. The walks started out as a kind of emotional purge, catalyzed at first by a scarcity of sensation; feet on a sidewalk going from one pool of streetlight to the next. A deeper acquaintance with the night engaged the senses in new ways. The blossoming plum trees, girlish in pink in the sun, shone at night from within, like meditating monks. Concoctions of smells hung in the moist air over whole blocks, jasmine, acacia, angel’s trumpet, sarcococca. Rustlings in the dark told of other mammals going about their business, that I was not alone. I felt invisible at times, nameless, like them.

One habit was soon established: ending up at the pocket park a few blocks from my house, a shoulder of hillside studded with boulders that beginning climbers attempt. I went most nights it didn’t rain and some nights it did, and took a seat in a concavity of stone. Usually only a few stars were visible: Orion, and sometimes The Big Bear, rising up in the north.

One night a black form swept overhead, startling me. I jumped up, and watched as it flew into the shadows of the eucalyptus trees on the hillside. It began an inquiry: who, who? Who who, I responded, you talking to me? We went back and forth a long time, for identity is a subject that even death does not resolve. I was thrilled. I wondered if it was a great horned owl, like the one I saw on a pine bough near campus a few years ago.

Eventually I started for home. I was not there before I made the obvious connection: the owl, symbol of wisdom, and Sophie, meaning wisdom. I was leaking tears, and all the while my mind was saying, a pretty story; like heaven, too pretty to believe. But I could enjoy the irony. I had expected some cosmic hiccup the moment she died, and here was a benediction, an emissary of transcendence, and I said, no thanks. Just be yourself.

When the winter chrysanthemums go
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.
—Matsuo Basho, translated by Robert Hass

Then it was spring, not by the calendar, but certainly by the heavy hand of the sun on my shoulders. The soggy leaves had turned an almost attractive mahogany. I still didn’t rake. There were more to fall. Poor ferns. Little did they expect they’d be featured in a survivalist adventure.

My niece, Lucia, on break from college, came for a four-day visit. Four days was brave of her, and me, I suppose, considering that we had never spent any time when there was just us. The first night, we walked to the park. I hadn’t told her about the owl, hoping that it would make a surprise appearance, but no such luck. I was hoping to hear cries of spontaneous enthusiasm and wonder. We had already settled into an occasionally frustrating pattern of engagement: I’d ask a question, she’d give a semi-audible answer, followed by a 15-minute recess.

The next day, a brilliant one, we drove down the coast to Año Nuevo. I was glad that she wasn’t reading her book, which she had brought along. I think she was impressed by Devil’s Slide. In the flatlands, mustard fields blazed yellow, the air crackling with energy from the ocean.

The elephant seals lay like super-sized slugs amid the dunes, as if beached by a high tide; models of a well-lived life. Now and then a snort would assure us bipeds that they were indeed alive. The guide said something about sleep apnea, but I didn’t quite catch it. I was feeling inclined to lie down in a sunny spot in the sand, and subsist for a time on blubber.

From a bluff we viewed a family tableau on the strand, mothers with pups surrounding Big Daddy. The guide said, that thing that looks like a branch, that’s a pup, but when I looked through the binoculars, it looked even more like a branch. Lucia thought so, too.

“Now if you have any questions, feel free to ask Jason or I,” the guide said as the group began the walk back to the trailhead.

“People make that mistake all the time, trying to sound educated, ‘I’ instead of ‘me,’” Lucia said.

“True,” I said, pleased about her interest in language and that she had used it without a prompt. Progress.

Saturday morning she was in her usual spot on the couch in the living room, plugging through the ninth and final volume of a fantasy series. I went outside to do some cleanup in the garden. I had hardly begun weeding when I thought: I could use some help. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.

“Sure,” she said.

“Your sneakers are going to get muddy,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Nope.”

I handed her the leaf rake, and gave minimal instructions regarding what to watch out for (bulbs, watering devices), and the goal: leaves transported to the compost pile. Once she got going, I watched without being too obvious, to gauge her level of involvement. Predictably there was not much to see, other than a methodical, capable doing of the job. She was not overly fussy; obviously she noticed there were more leaves overhead, some even twirling down as she raked. I would have done no differently.

“Oh my God,” she blurted out.

“What is it?”

“A snake. I just saw a snake. It went into the ivy. It must have been a foot long. I love snakes.”

Bravo, snake.

“What now?” she asked, the raking finished.

I wanted to plant some greens and kale that had been sitting too long in cell packs. One of the vegetable beds was covered with arugula that had grown into tough little shrublets. We uprooted them and I put them aside on the deck, not sure if they were good for anything. (What would Aunt Dot do?) In the pantry were radish seeds I needed to use up, so I asked Lucia to plant them. Instead of planting them in a row, as I expected, she scattered them in the midst of the greens. Why not?

“What is that?” she asked as I gathered the bunches of arugula. When I expressed surprise she didn’t know, she said (defensively?) “I’ve heard of it.”

“Well, I never heard of making it into a soup but that’s what I’m going to try to do. You still feel like helping, or you had enough?”

“Nope.”

“Nope what?”

“I’ll help.”

Using scissors I snipped off the leaves for her to wash, telling her how when Obama was running for president in Iowa he said something about the high price of arugula and was ridiculed for being an out-of-touch elitist, even though Iowans grow lots of arugula.

“He should have said radishes, maybe,” Lucia said.

“They’re in the same family.” Like us, I almost said. I asked, “You think Obama’s a good president?”

“So far, I guess. You?”

I said I thought he was a gigantic improvement over the former, but also, that I had misgivings. I mentioned what John Greenleaf Whittier had written when it seemed Lincoln wavered regarding emancipation, how it brought Obama to mind: “I am much afraid that a domestic cat will not answer when one wants a Bengal tiger.”

“Bengal tigers are elitist,” she said, smiling to herself.

 

The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish.
—Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass

“I told her I was in love with Lincoln,” I said, ladling dark green soup into Rita’s bowl.

“What did she say?” Rita asked.

“‘You’re weird.’ Talk about a generation gap. She wants to join the FBI. When I was 20 I wondered if the FBI was bugging my phone.”

“You flatter yourself.”

“Flattery’s a good thing. Did you see her blush when you told her how pretty she was? Were you that shy and withheld when you were 20?”

Rita, blowing lightly on the spooned soup, raised her eyelids. “Didn’t you tell me she was on the boys’ wrestling team in high school? She can’t be that shy. Why does it bother you?”

“I guess I was hoping we would establish something beyond generic uncle. I kept thinking of Aunt Dot. And Sophie. But you can’t orchestrate that. It happens or it doesn’t.”

“And it doesn’t happen overnight. How did you relate to your parents’ generation when you were 20? Give it time. Did you bring up the FBI thing?”

“I can’t tell her what to do.”

“Who said tell her what to do? You might have learned something about her, met her on her terms. And maybe she would have liked to hear your honest reaction. Or were you being withheld?”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“Be yourself.”

“Who, me? What do you think of the soup?”

“Best soup I’ve had in years.”

“Lucia liked it too. She scraped every smidgen out of her bowl.”

“That’s exactly what you loved best about Sophie,” Rita said, putting down her spoon. “How she scraped every smidgen out of her bowl. By the way, is there more?”
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R. E. Faro is a regular contributor to The Monthly since 1996. A collection of his previous columns, In Faro’s Garden, A Tour and Some Detours, was published by Ithuriel’s Spear Press. Readers can find his blog at berrypicking.wordpress.com.

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