The Night Road

Riding north on the Thruway late last night. The entire rest of the world save myself and the steady breathing of the engine--well, maybe every once in a while the cold fingers of the air pressing on my neck, and maybe a sudden awareness of my hands on the grips, the right one starting to cramp--was merely a suggestion. The world reduced to Might exist; might not. And That's not my concern anyway.

There was only me in a large blackness. This led to a long riff on the nature of riding as ideal metaphor: We are all essentially alone; we glance off substances, and we occasionally sense others as well as the ether around us, but we're always riding alone.

Actually, this thought did not occur to me, true though puerile. That's because I was busy doing it. There was no time to think about it.

Here's what I was really thinking: Thank god you got off Long Island intact--those freaking urban drivers are maniacs. I love feeling the risk of an Infiniti taking off my footpeg at 85, don't you? And man, my taillight must look so small they won't know what exactly it is until they hit it. I wonder how well the reflective tape on my jacket and helmet is doing? And does 287 really turn into 87, or do I have to exit? Wait--that was a deer crossing sign: Pay attention! Do not forget!

Does my high beam suck too much power? Is it okay to run it against oncoming traffic?

I can't see the watch I velcroed onto the dash; you know, I thought it had a luminous dial. Oh well. The tach's gone, too, broken; the only thing I have to gauge my passage the speedo, and the wheels and dials (so lightly calibrated! so meticulous in all they measure!) inside of me. That's how we really know we're going, no need for anything else really. I have the sensation of being here. It's small enough and big enough all at once.

Actually, the metaphor is apt. I am going through it alone. My dear friend, the one who has always been there for me, in times of trouble and of happiness but mainly the former, which is why he is so dear, is once again counseling me. "Until you see that being alone is not lonely, Melissa, until you are able to embrace solitude and being with yourself, you will not be happy."

The ride alone last night was composed of solitude, and I could see exactly what Tony meant. I felt it. I've had rides that were lonely, so that's how I knew. This felt different. Full and rich: simple, just a straight shot up the highway on a late summer evening, but sufficient unto itself. I was attentive to the risks, but not their prisoner; I knew I would be home in two hours, but I was happy I was not there yet; I trusted the thousands parts of the little Guzzi valiant underneath me, every working piece (every clap of the tappets audible in their millions when I listened--the amazement of it!) put together with love, in love, and loved in return, which is how she runs.

There have been moments recently, I regret to report, that have caused a lump of self-pity in my throat: Why do I have to handle all this alone? Just a little help. That's all I want!

I know the response this will call forth from my friends, but they can save their energy: I've already excoriated myself for it. Now I would like to report some new knowledge. I can turn anything around, at least in my mind, even if it doesn't stack the firewood or fight with the school district or repair the broken shower. That's because those aren't the real problems, I now see; feeling that they are is the problem. All our big battles are always fought alone, whether our armies contain one, or two. The victories, too, belong to each in isolation. So I can keep the phillips-head screwdriver in the bathroom, and that takes care of that. The rest is just like that ride on the night road: done, and everything.

Girls on Motorcycles

{The piece that follows was written for the Women Who Ride seminar at the 2011 national BMW rally, in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, on a July weekend that was the hottest I've ever endured. Reference is made to that in the third paragraph below. This short piece, I realized, encapsulates my past four years. And it points to the future.}

***

In a profound and complex way, motorcycles have given me a life. They have brought love, both for an object and with other people; after making it once, I don’t think I’ll ever make the mistake again of finding myself paired with a man who doesn’t ride. But more important even than that, motorcycles have given me a subject.

For in the deepest part of me, I am a writer (as well as a rider) and I don’t know that I would be one without motorcycles. It was the intense, jumping-up-and-down, collaring-strangers-in-the-street passion I felt for them that gave me an idea I could not let go of until I had exhausted many pens, a tree and a half, and a prototype laptop. The result, although I did not know it when I began scribbling simply because I had too many thoughts in my head and they were going to cause it to explode if I didn’t offload them, was my first book.

Although I didn’t conceive it as something I was writing as a woman for women, the fact is (last time I checked) I am a woman and that colors every nuance of how one looks at the world and its phenomena. Men and women, even in the pursuit of a common passion, necessarily experience it differently. We literally have different brains. Then there is the fact that we are perceived differently by the rest of the world—but I have to tell you that, despite what they think, I have never ridden while wearing a bikini, with the sole exception of the ride here, but at least it was under my Aerostich—while we too perceive things differently. My pride in the long history of my sisters who rode—a history as long as that of this machine—was equal parts “Hey, see here! We can do it too, and well!” and pure human joy. It was not the whole story, just as men do not own it all either, but I did not want it excised. I wanted it there, emphatically.

I wanted everything there. I thought I had put it all there, everything I could possibly say about bikes, and then I closed the cover. Done.

But what we believe about what we are doing is not always what is in actuality what really happens.

After a long period during which the aforementioned mistake was practiced at length, I faced the same crisis so many of us do—fifty percent of the population, I am given to understand. This has a way of unmooring you from all that is familiar, all you thought was stable and permanent. For a while afterward, you just float. For me, it was motorcycles that reappeared to provide an anchor in choppy waters.

Or rather, it was motorcycles as delivered by one person. A very, very persistent person by the name of John Ryan. At first I just thought he was one of those messianic boosters that our sport occasionally creates. But no. As I slowly learned, he is sui generis—no one lives or thinks as he does about bikes, and no one does what he does on them.

It was a blessing not only to be riding again, but also to have a puzzle to ponder: briefly, in the case of John, it was “W. T. F.??” I had known about the Iron Butt Rally, certainly, in what I was beginning to refer to as my First Motorcycle Life, but then I’d just figured they were a tiny group of fringe fanatics who were so deep into something ungraspable by the rest of us that they were merely a footnote. I’d already written that footnote; I think I took care of them in a sentence. Done.

Then my brain started chewing again on the subject of motorcycles—ever various, I now know—and what in particular extreme long-distance riders like John were doing. And lo and behold, I had a new subject. A new bike, and a new book.

New friends. New destinations. New life. If a woman ever needed these, it was me. If a machine can ever give such gifts, it is the motorcycle.

Art Persists

With pretty much everything sliding into the crapper--my personal life, London, the stock market, and new power to the Tea Party front for the corporate interests that won't stop until they've sucked us dry like the world's freaking biggest mosquito, the government having run out of repellent--it didn't look like there was any bright spot anywhere in my vicinity. Until my son and I leaned back last night and gave ourselves up to a film.

Last Christmas I had gravely disconcerted him. We needed something new for the top of the tree. When I stumbled on the image of the dove of peace, above--sporting flak vest and a laser target on his chest--I knew I'd found the perfect thing. So Today. (Unfortunately, also so Yesterday and Tomorrow.) I printed it and tied it on with a silk ribbon. I then had my very own Banksy for the tree; my son, thankfully not yet attuned to the sad ironies of the grownup world, was disturbed. I told him I found it oddly hopeful: at least someone was watching, and speaking the truth. With the keen succinctness of art.

Banksy is a British street artist whose work is subversive, haunting, poignant, knife-sharp, humorous and/or disturbing. It's unrelentingly smart. And--though this seems painfully obvious, even if to me it is the point--he has always done it because he had to, not because he was making things to sell. A lot of it was precisely observant of the institution of commerce, in fact, though one cannot really blame him for the eventuality that its very success in this endeavor has lately made it hugely valuable in the buy-and-sell art world.

The art world makes me want to vomit, actually, not only because it is filled with reprehensible characters who position their impossibly fashionable selves at the sharp pinnacle of the food chain, but because they eat artists whole and spit out their bones on the sidewalk. I had a taste of this (um, not an artist) working in a gallery in the eighties, and dating an artist. And now I know brilliant artists who can't get the time of day from a gallery; thus they are in despair almost to the point of giving up their work.

Don't give up--take it to the streets! That, in part, is the message of hope in Banksy's marvelous, surprising movie Exit Through the Gift Shop. It is a window on the life of the enlivening world of street art (aka graffiti, in some sense, but a full bloomed, legitimate genre of its own). And it is a subtle, wise discussion of commerce, the necessity of persisting against difficulties, and true art vs. simulacra produced for the purpose of selling--and the fact that the public is often so stupid they can't tell the difference.

I needed to watch this, right now, at this very moment, it seems. Giving up, in every particular, had been looking like the informed choice. But now I don't think I should. Nor should any of us. We need to take to the streets, because that is what is left to us now. There, we can make people wonder. Make people see. Make art, and persist.

Just a Wee Tiny Despair

Here at the swimming hole, Nelly is tied on a long line. She ventures out--freedom is mine!--and then she hits the end and feels the implacable rigor of The Tree. She is tethered, an unusual state for this free-ranging dog, because there are people here with food. (And where, I submit, are there people in America who don't sally forth without food anymore? I know we're hardwired as animals to eat whatever food is available, but hasn't this gotten ridiculous? What meal is it that these people are eating at 3:30 in the afternoon--tea? With submarine sandwiches?)

Nelly too is wired, programmed, habituated, reinforced, and possibly drawn by supernatural beings to obtain food. Now--and here is the secret that many people don't get--some dogs are born like this, and some aren't. It's not a moral thing, though that's the gloss one hears over and over: "My dog is a good dog. He won't steal food." Ahem. To a dog, as long as there aren't bared fangs in the proximity, anything is fair game. On a plate or not. What is a plate?

Until someone can give me a plausibly logical explanation of how a member of another species learns the concept of ownership--something that's messed us up, for sure, and leads to taxes, wars, partisan fighting, and the whole Housewives franchise, to mention a few of the pits dogs have not fallen into--I won't buy it. Just as I no longer believe in the tooth fairy, having been the tooth fairy for some nine years now.

Which brings me to my small despair. No, not that after said nine years, I have pretty much run out of ideas for what to put under the pillow, before he has run out of teeth. And no, not that Nelly is driving (has driven?) me nuts with her incessant vocalizations--why didn't I get one of those good dogs, one of the quiet ones?

(I say, like a mantra, what trainer Kim told me long ago, when I had also reached the end of my rope: "You get the dog you need," meaning the struggle to overcome her problems will somehow lead me directly to the problems I must struggle with inside myself.) My companionable despair has to do with how dogs are treated--and the book I feel I must write about it.

Five years now, and I've been spinning my wheels. The way in has not shown itself. No subject has seemed as big, or as impenetrable. I don't know how to say what I know I want to say--desperately want to say--in a way that will yield better results than it has at any number of parties.

Take one last week. The chitchat turned to dogs, and to trainers. As always, there was murmured approval for one of the telegenic proponents of old-fashioned German military thread of training (developed by Konrad Most at the turn of the last century). William Koehler popularized the style, though if you have a drop of genuine love for animals in you, you might want to spare yourself the nausea that follows on studying his methodology. He is alive and well (though he himself is dead) in the trainers that people today adore. They look stricken if you dissent: I literally cannot count the times I got into conversations at parties in the past six years--yes, flirtations that were going quite well, thank you, with smiles and deep eye-locks and all the rest--when such a dissent from me caused the immediate dynamiting of good feeling and turned it to rubble. So quickly. But I can't not say what I know: that our sad, sick love of domination because it makes us feel good to hurt, to make others fear us, is harming the animals we purport to love. And do. The myth of dominance in regards to dogs--just Google it--has been put to rest by scientists with knowledge far greater than mine. (Hence a seed of the despair.) And the way of hope--an obedient dog, as well as a happy one, who has been taught without pain or fear--is readily available. But people don't want it. Why? The despair grows.

It bloomed full open, when a guest, a gentle young woman, revealed that a movie had been made about the local trainer I call The Nazi (I've seen him teach his clients to kick their dogs, and his prime arsenal consists of neck injury by collar pops and repetitive yelling, which nonetheless don't work all too well, witness the time I walked by his class with Nelly in a perfect heel, while his students' dogs were breaking all over the place). And she smiled as she declared herself a fan of the guy after seeing it.

Why are we so attracted to punishment? Why do we fear, and belittle, kindness? Moreover, kindness that works, because it is scientifically grounded in how mammals learn? A law, rather than a myth. Why? Why the persistence and valorization of methods that hurt, and that don't even work? Why our blindness?

Why the demonization of a treat? Please, folks, it's just food. It's just what the dog is programmed to want more than just about anything, although in their time, water, freedom, the door opening, a tennis ball, can be more desired, and hence should be used. The one thing it's silly to think a dog wants--though people do it all the time--is praise. Hello? Words in English? Where do those appear in canid evolution, pray tell?

If my life depended on a dog doing what it has been taught, then I will find a dog who has been clicker trained. (My clumsy shorthand for operant conditioning.) It is what the Navy realized, when it was placing people's lives on the line when it was training dolphins for top-secret work. They hired a man named Bob Bailey, who in 1962 became the Director of Animal Training for the Navy. This is not an outfit that has any place for sentimentality; they must know that something works, and they must be damn sure of it. And Bailey found that only operant conditioning could give that level of reliability. In his illustrious career as an animal trainer--across 140 different species, and thousands of individual animals--he has proved beyond a doubt that what works is positive reinforcement. It is also, just coincidentally, humane. He has said that if aversives worked, he would have certainly used them; but the uncontrollable fallout from their use is too dangerous when lives are at stake. He meant the lives of humans. But he could as well have meant those of our companion animals, whose troublesome behaviors are often exacerbated by punishment-based training to the point where euthanasia is required.

It is possible, if one searches, to find the trainers who have been called in to mop up the messes created by our beloved television personality, the one who gives us permission to frighten, hurt, and dominate our dogs--and smile while he is doing so. He tells us it is right, and we happily believe.

My despair crystallized in the deeply dismayed gazes of the dinner guests whose paeans to the local trainer were not seconded by me. The conversation froze. I froze too, thinking, How? How can I say what I know in my heart and in my mind?

If I cannot get it across to some friends gathered around the cheese plate on the kitchen counter, and if I cannot get it across to some guy who was already leaning toward "Maybe I could give you a call sometime?", how the hell can I write a book about it?

Oh, it's a good thing my despair is so small.

Connected

As the years wind on--given the fact that this summer is going by in about three minutes, I predict I'll be checking in to the assisted living center sometime late fall--I try to stay healthy. I'm not real good at that, though, because evil temptations unveil themselves before my inability to resist like buff young men, winking their dark brown eyes from under locks of curling hair. So my longevity plan consists largely of friends.

Being connected to others socially and familially is one of the best predictors of a healthy longer life. Besides the fact that a life without friends isn't really worth living.

But there is a special type of friend: the girlfriend. It may come as a surprise to some (and it's possible that I'm aberrant in this, being aberrant in so much else), but there is a point in a young girl's life when she desires a girlfriend more than she desires any boy ever made, or even conceived of by Hollywood's fabulist machine or author of transporting fiction. There's an intensity and excitement to the friendship that is all-consuming, like a four-story fire.

The first girl I ever fell in love with (for it was that, love: blinding, filled with craving for her presence) was Beth. It was high school. She was a fabric artist, dark and yearning, moody and fun. She took me horseback riding on her family's farm. She was the Older Girl (one year) and I was breathless with the news that she apparently considered me a friend. One night we put Joni Mitchell's Blue on the record player in her room. In the morning, it was still turning round and round. Nine hours, and every song on the A side is now permanently burned into my soul.

Several years ago I heard that Beth had died. The thought that a chunk of life--time, energy, blood, discovery, everything that is ever is or will be--had been cut out and then pushed through the side of the universe to leave such a hole (the way an eye is cut out of a pumpkin, leaving only absence) was impossible to hold in the brain. It actually hurt the neurons.

In college, freshman year, I met Beatrice. Corner room across from mine. Abstract painter, beauty. We sometimes walked the campus hand in hand. I posed for a life-size portrait. She posed for my Yashica and its Plus-X film. The next three years we joined forces with other girls, other tight friends, to live in on-campus housing. After that, she found us an apartment together in Hoboken, and we launched ourselves, together, though also increasingly separately, toward bigger life. She showed me her New York, the one she had grown up in, all the places that became my own.

Nearly thirty years later, today, her voice on the phone, buoying me. She knows me, and loves me, I think, and cares for me. And I her.

Someday, maybe, we will shop for our canes together. I hope so. They will be stylish, unusual, and she will make a joke and laugh with that quick knowing laugh of hers. I think we will always be friends, until the bitter end, which will be sweet therefore. Because she's mine.

Rally Round

They come from all over. They've packed up to depart at first light. It might take them two or three days. There's that moment--crystalline, kept forever in the small jewel box of such images--when they take the last turn of a thousand, and then they have arrived. Spread before them is a sacred ground. The movable nation.

The call of the rally is the motorcyclist's muezzin--the ritual call to prayer. It is what the summer is made for, unless you are truly hardcore. Unless difficulties make you smile, and party all the better. Unless you are up to camping in Bavaria in winter (above) at the Elefanten rally. Actually, this looks like a ton of fun to me.

Because there is something about gathering with your tribe. Strange as you may be, there are at least a hundred others just like you. What a relief.

I am one of those people who rarely turns down an invitation. If I have to break the speed limit to get to two parties on the same night at opposite sides of the county, well, so be it. I love gathering.

But there is nothing like a motorcycle gathering. I'll stand on my head and balance a chair on my foot, metaphorically speaking, to rearrange the calendar to get to the one or two rallies that are most important to me. And why are they important?

Well. For one thing, there's that crystalline moment. What--a split second of a vision? That's what you go for? A day or two of riding, so many gallons of precious fossil fuel?

No, not exactly. For the expectation of that moment, something even more ephemeral.

It is the same expectation that precedes the party. Plan what you will wear (lay out the gear). Take pleasure in arranging the conveyance (the straps cinched down just so on the camping equipment, clicked together as neatly as the pieces of a puzzle). The route taken is the embarkation on a slowly building crescendo of anticipation (the backroads map placed in the map pocket, highlighted). All of it drives toward the moment of arrival.

So tonight the bike is washed (after a fashion; my scattershot approach to everything, including washing, shows on my bike, which actually looked worse after it dried than it did before I first turned the hose on it). Tire pressure checked, oil checked. The clothes are folded on the chair upstairs, ready to be packed, while on the kitchen counter sits a bag of miscellaneous foodstuffs (hey, it's possible that when you get to the motel, the thing you'll want more than anything is a plastic cup of pinot grigio from a paper carton and some salt-and-pepper cashews, so it's best to bring these along for the eventuality).

One thing I know. I will not know what will happen this weekend. I could meet my new best friend. I could meet a thousand of them. I am prepared. I am even prepared to take a jaded view of the religiosity of this particular event, an industrial-strength meeting of the tightest and (some might say) most sanctimonious of all marques. I have to tweak them, just a little bit. So I had a sticker made to put on my bag lest anyone have any doubts about my true allegiance: "My other bike is a Moto Guzzi." Still, I quiver with excitement. I do not know what might happen. But I know what I hope.

A couple of weekends ago, I was found at another gathering that has taken its place on my calendar as one that I will not miss. It was local, so I didn't have to pack, or release all that much greenhouse gas. But there was the flutter of excitement that to me will always accompany meetings of motorcyclists. For most who had pulled in to the parking lot at the lodge for an hour of tire-kicking before a show ride to lunch, this was merely a pleasant way to pass a Sunday in July. But for me, it was and will remain something far greater. Two years ago, this vintage ride out of Woodstock was the place where, as I now assign its true importance, life began again for me. There were people to talk to again. New hope. New affiliations. A new purpose. And a new date on the calendar, every year. Where we get together, and I arrive.

Concern File

What is important?

It depends on where you sit and what moment you ask the question.

If you are struggling with something--and who isn't struggling with something; I used to believe everyone else was happy and confident, but now that I'm older and wiser, I know that anxiety is pretty much everyone's little companion--it's hard for the worry du jour not to become the world. The front page of the paper is just that: paper, thin, and replaced in twenty-four hours by another sheet with grisly color photos taken in some other world. One so terrible it can't be believed.

The most powerful biological urge in the undamaged psyche is the care of one's offspring: it is this way for you, for me, and for the milk cow whose calf is taken from her and for whom the anguish is vocal, and complete. It is the same for all parents.

The Somali people are stumbling toward Dadaab, Kenya, on journeys of more than a month, to reach what is now the world's largest refugee camp. They are trying to escape drought-induced starvation, and their children are falling by the wayside. Can you imagine this? Your small child, malnourished, thirsty, forced to walk day after day until he can go no farther, and he drops. The reversal of nature's order turns the universe on its side, and everything falls off into clattering ruin.

The magnitude, and the raw agony, of such a situation makes the privileged feel paralyzed, at least for a moment. A little while ago, it was Japan: and we couldn't wrap our brains around that, either. Although there were a lot of benefit concerts to aid that ravaged country. I haven't heard much about Japan recently. I also haven't heard about many charity art auctions for Somalia. Maybe it's too big. It's been going on for too long. It's too far away.

First their animals starved. You can do an image search--"Somalia drought" is all you need to type in, and 628,000 results later you are drowning in the horror. Small children whose bloated bellies over spindly legs and empty eyes define the word "wrong." The adults who know what's coming for them, unstoppable, and they show it in fearful faces. Goats and camels, skeletons with hair, some still walking, most only a few minutes away from the final groan, the drop to the knees that will be their last. The people, the people, ground down to bare life. Nothing more.

I will not point out the awful disparity between our lives, even those Americans who are struggling in this economy that assures so much to so few, and tells the rest to go to hell, and people who are dying by the million because they have no water and no food. It's a cliche to mention that I just bought whatever I felt like buying (watermelon, bread, strawberries, olives) at the grocery store, and still I have worries that keep me awake some nights. What is wrong with us? Do we not do anything because we don't care? Or do we not care because we can't do anything?

It's a messed-up world where those who have too much can't even reach those who have nothing. And are about to fall over the edge.

Yesterday at the farmer's market (the line for felafel sandwiches, $8 each, was about twenty-five people long), I ran into an acquaintance I hadn't seen in a year or so. A brilliant writer. She smiled and told me I looked wonderful: "It's so nice to see you. How are you?" I told the truth: really well. But the question returned caused a strange look to pass over her face, even though she said, "I'm pretty well." Maybe it was the half-beat pause before the adjective. "Pretty well?" I asked. "But not great, right?" All of a sudden her visage collapsed, the happy-to-see-you mask. "My daughter's just been diagnosed with cancer."

The universe is tilting for her, and things are beginning to slide to one side, precedent to falling off. We would do anything for our children. It is an imperative written into our cells. Their survival is our concern. The only one that matters.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Birds do it, bees do it.

Be Here Now

I live in history. I live in a place that is not the place you think. That is to say, I live in Woodstock. (All right, near Woodstock: the town that I live in is no town at all now, being located on the barren rocky floor of a New York City reservoir.) It has long called to artists; the picture here was taken in 1924, at one of the annual Maverick festivals held on social activist Hervey White's farm, to which he invited all sorts of outcasts and Greenwich Village "bohemians," who scandalized the local farmers.

It was just a place to which they came. They hardly knew, or chose, where exactly it was. It could have been a little farther into the Catskills, say Fleischmanns, for all they cared (it was not; later, that place would call to the Hasidim, who likewise scandalized the locals, but for different reasons). But it was a good place--the perfect place. All an artist needs is endless green views, miles of woods, a few hard hills to climb, and stuff to make costumes. Then bring on the wine.

Years later, and the musicians came. Notable among them was Bob Dylan, who brought mystery to Woodstock.

He was becoming famous, as was his destiny, if not his plan. He was often seen zipping around town, from and to his house in the Byrdcliffe artists colony, on his '64 Triumph T100. In July of 1966, he either did or did not crash said bike on Streibel Road. It's certainly a crashable road: it climbs steeply up from 212, Woodstock's main street, nearly opposite the Bearsville complex that housed Dylan manager Albert Grossman's recording studio, then Todd Rundgren's Utopia studio, and now a theater, radio station, and fancypants eatery at which all Woodstock society (read: New York City expatriates) comes to see and be seen. History rolls on, from the past directly into the present, merely changing casts.

The bike wreck may or may not have occurred; some have speculated it was a publicity ploy. At any rate, it didn't hurt Dylan much, even if it did crack a vertebra. He got famouser and famouser. Then he left Woodstock.

And then Woodstock left Woodstock. The famous music festival that bears its name was supposed to have happened here, but wasn't; it was about 66 miles distant. Perhaps this has saved the real Woodstock. Or perhaps not, since there probably wouldn't be this new generation of stoners hanging out on the village green, or shops selling tie-dye and candles and pipes (not to mention triple-milled soaps and cashmere sweaters) if the mistake weren't rather easy to make.

There aren't a whole lot of mavericks, or artists, in Woodstock anymore; it's too expensive. There are film people, and music industry people, and industry industry people, and their gorgeous modern houses up in the woods, or their gorgeous old farmhouses with beautiful and vast gardens in the valleys between peaks.

But it's become my town too, by accident. Or fortune. These are the same things, I believe. The town park is the ground that Nelly and I love best, of all places. There will never be a day, I hope, that I don't walk into the meadow and gasp at the sight of the mountains rising up on the other side of town, magisterial, implacable, eloquent in their silence. Then we turn and go into the woods. We are refreshed by the water of the creek; me, by its permanent flux, Nelly by the cool wet of it on her long tongue.

Woodstock is not my home--home is the place that grew me, the place that sent its minerals into my sap through the roots, the place that will never leave me though I have left it. It is always there, underneath, bedrock anchoring me. It is the place that I start breaking the speed limit as I approach on return, eager to see: as if I might turn the corner in my old neighborhood to catch sight of myself, riding fast down a brick-paved hill on Delaware Avenue on a green Raleigh, the English racer that long ago disappeared from the stairwell in another home, Brooklyn. It is the place that visits me, strangely, as I lie on my back on the sticky mat in yoga as the teacher intones "Peace in your hearts . . . " I see Ohio then. I feel Ohio then.

Woodstock is temporary. I walk its sidewalks in the footsteps of the departed, Dylan, and Hervey White before him, and a hundred others who have come and gone. It is home, for now. Maybe it will visit me, too, in years hence when I am told to not hold on to anything, to let it all go.

Going into town: this is a way of saying "rejoining society." When I need the feeling that I belong somewhere, to the strange tribe that has gathered to make something of our lives, I go now to Woodstock. It is a fine place. It is what I have been given.

Somewhere Up There

Dear Abby runs a repeating theme in her column (and yes, I am a devoted reader: where else can one simultaneously gloat over others' extraordinary bad behavior, and be chastened about one's own?) titled "Pennies from Heaven." In it, people recount their experiences with what they believe are messages from their dear departed. In an uncharitable mood, I might retitle it "Wishful Thinking"; it's such a bald case of desire remaking reality in its own image. (The intense version of what we do all the time, in so many ways, count them.)

But my smugness vanishes when I simply imagine the cold thump in the chest when the eye lands on what it believes it sees. What could be realer than the slow dawning of a sensation that eclipses every other sensation? The sensation that someone is back.

Apparently pennies are worth more as melted copper than they are as currency. People throw them away. If you feel a twinge of unrightness every time you see this, then you are officially Old. Sorry. There are signs.

We have thus all become accustomed to finding them everywhere, including our sock drawers. But in the past several days, they've been leaping at me in such numbers I started noticing, then puzzling, finally feeling a bit alarmed. My opinion on the existence of a Higher Power in the Great Beyond has been tiresomely documented here, so I don't need to repeat that. And yet . . . (The great hallelujah in life: the opportunity to say "And yet . . . ")

Someone is trying to tell me something. And either that someone is a masterful magician, or else I am wrong in my scientific suppositions. Then again, that someone might well be in me. Perhaps I am trying to tell myself something. But how'd I get all those pennies to appear?

On the seat of my car. At a table in a restaurant. In my pocket. In the tankbag of my bike. On my bedside table. On the kitchen counter. Underneath my desk. Yesterday, at Trader Joe's, I heard a clatter, and a penny was rolling toward my foot. It stopped right in front of me. I looked up, but everyone was busy perusing the organic lemonade and sea salt potato chips.

Was I about to get lucky? You have no idea how much I need it, right now. Or so I think. I am aware this has dangers: Luck is not delivered. It is made.

(My brother-in-law, a crack backgammon player, was once smearing me all over the floor in a game. He threw doubles after doubles, racing around the board while I stayed still, taking the hits. "You are so lucky!" I exclaimed after he threw double 5s, again. "A good player makes the dice look lucky," he replied, and I heard this with the unmistakable press of truth. Look: I'm retailing the story twenty years later, so it made an impression.)

In a moment of despair, questioning everything but getting stony silence for answers, I phone a friend. Well, at least there's one thing that's right in my life right now: wonderful friends I can call when in despair. Finally, I tell her about this . . . this weird occurrence. The plethora of pennies suddenly coming to me. I feel strange as all get-out relating it. But I know she won't laugh.

Instead, she assists me in crawling toward the first answer I've had in a while: maybe, she says, it's my way of reminding myself that in order for something good to happen, the initial step is realizing how much good I already have. The anguish re-frames itself in that moment: Maybe things are going to be all right after all! I take my hands from the iron railing of the figurative high bridge over the hard gray river. I turn and start to walk again. To the other side.

At that moment, holding the phone against my ear, my eye stops roving--over the roofline, the sight of the chimney cut out against the sooty clouds, the branches of the pine swaying. It is drawn downward. I am still laughing about the pennies from heaven. That is when I see it. A penny, right under the footstool of the deck chair I am sitting on. I am saying the word, and here is the thing.

Yes, here is the thing.

Not-So-Total Control

On Friday night, I drove my son back to the school he had left on the bus four hours earlier. Now, though, it was a transformed place: no longer just a place of boredom, occasional interest, even more occasional tears. It was the place where a milestone has now been planted deep in the earth, the place of the First Dance.

In the car we approached the cafeteria door, my son wearing the jeans he had worn all day but with the addition of a button-down shirt, not tucked in though (fashion-immune, my son nonetheless had a small moment of panic a half hour before we left: "Oh, I wish I'd asked somebody else what they were wearing!"). The door of a car before us opened, and from it emerged a . . . a what? A girl-woman, in high-heeled silver sandals. A slinky dress. And blonde hair arranged as if by paintbrush into a multitude of glistening arcs, each held by a rhinestoned clip. I had a sudden understanding why none of the boys I liked when I was this age liked me back: we were living in different countries, in different centuries too, that's why. My boy, who still plays with Legos and is in his All Weapons, All the Time phase, does not exist in the same space-time continuum as these girls. (I now saw a gaggle of them crowded around the door, pointing to their friend; they were nervous as all get-out yet dressed to thrill).

He grimly opened the door of the car--I know he would have pled with me to keep driving and take him home, but for the fact that those six girls had spied him, too--and without a word of goodbye got out. As if there were a noose hanging from the disco ball in the decorated cafeteria, just waiting for him.

I know the anxiety. It doesn't just disappear all at once, when we leave sixth grade behind. ("Oh, I've mastered all that. I'll never again care what others think of me so much it keeps me awake all night. I'm done!")

I still have it, if in slightly reduced form, when I go to a party where there are strangers. I still have it, when I get up to read in front of an audience. I still have it, when I feel judged by an editor or the panel of a prize committee. But nothing ratchets it up quite like publishing a book. That is where I am at. Every step along the way--getting back the edited manuscript (I let it sit, in its unopened FedEx envelope, on my office floor for two weeks before I mustered the courage to open it); seeing the first jacket designs, like the prom dress you will wear on what feels like the most important night of your life, and then the fights where you implore your publisher to take off the frilly sleeves and remake it in something other than scratchy polyester; the interminable wait while a list of eminent writers decide whether or not your brand-new baby is worthy of a read and a comment for use as a hook on the back of the jacket (in today's new publishing world, apparently not, I've learned).

There's more. Much more to make my stomach lurch in the coming months.

The day after the dance found me in Troy, New York, in a blazing hot parking lot. I was there to take a Total Control riding clinic, the culmination of a dream first dreamed two years ago when I witnessed one at the BMW MOA rally in Tennessee: Is it possible that I could ever ride like that? I wondered as I saw riders inscribing small but precise circles at even speed, inside knee kissing the tar.

I worked hard. I tried hard. My clothes stuck to me as if they had been painted with glue, and my helmet was damp whenever I put it back on. I hope I learned; I felt as though I didn't, but the instructor insured me I would realize later that I had. I will try to treat it as a fun game, as they taught; I will not let my anxiety turn my frontal lobes off while it consumes the primitive brain stem. I will control my out-of-control fears about not doing well enough, not writing well enough, not looking cool enough at the dance.

One student in our class stood high above the others. One student moved elegantly, precisely, an instant master of every exercise. At the end of the day, I turned to her. "I want to tell you that you are the prettiest rider here--both out on the course, and when you take your helmet off." She smiled widely. She was indeed pretty; what I envied most, though, was her skill on the bike.

"What's your secret?" I asked conspiratorially. But I didn't really expect her to be able to tell me such a thing. It had to be too big to voice.

It turned out not to be.

Her smile widened as if to light the whole world. "A life lived in joy!" she explained.

There is no question to which this is not the appropriate answer. I left there thinking on this all the way home. A week later, and it is still in my mind. When it's my turn to go to the prom, I hope I can remember. But better than that, I hope it's soaked all the way down. So that it's everywhere, in me and all the potentially lost moments of this life.

Copilot

It took a while. It always takes a while for the road to run through you, so you can run through the memories of the road. These come back, not strangely at all, as you ride the current road. This is how you know what that trip really meant, by visiting other landscapes (which will in their own time be recalled at a distance). I never wrote about that monumental trip of last year, because until now I did not know what it was about. I know what it felt like. But it did not have a story to tell, until I put my son on the back of the bike again last week.

I remember one moment of terror, out west last August. My child, the most precious, necessary thing in the world--without whom, I am lost--is sitting behind me. Most of the time, he squirms. If our riding partner is behind us, my son turns suddenly, shifting his weight near disastrously, to make certain he is back there. (No matter how many times I have told him I will always keep our friend in my rearview mirrors, and will stop immediately if something happens. No matter how many times I have told him he must not move around, especially when we are moving slowly through narrow gaps in traffic--yoicks!) He suddenly decides he needs to look at the ground under the left side of the rear tire, throwing all his weight left as we approach a stop sign; I have lost track of how many times I was this far from that mercuric white panic: S**t, we're going down!

But the particular moment I was recalling had in fact been preceded by a long, long period of calm happiness. It was so pure, in fact, I was not aware of anything at all: I was completely inside it, riding-happiness, thick and creamy and sweet. Then, suddenly, I was aware of it, which means I was aware of something wrong. By way of something right: I had been riding along for many miles not feeling anything but the machine propelling me through air and time. There was no demented sprite of the ether pulling the bike to right or left, no brief gasps or injections of adrenaline.

My child! He fell off the bike ten miles ago!

I thrust my hand behind me and felt his leg there. Oouhh. Jesus H. Christ. That was scary.

He had just been . . . quiet. Perhaps he too had entered that whipped-cream cloud, riding-through-peacefulness.

Now, in central New York, on our way to a seminal destination, one I had been thinking of taking him for several years and was here en route at last, I was back on the roads of what has passed into my own history, the thousands of miles that traced our manifest destiny. I looked and saw again what I had seen then. A sight that moved me so profoundly I never found words for it: the vision, in the mirror, of how he was occupying himself back there behind me, so close and yet so far. He was testing the air, arm out. He was flying along, to wherever I would take him. Seeing his hand held against the air, a tender wing, called up in me so many different emotions I could not count them all. It resisted, just slightly, the pressure of the wind. And I realized then: the pressure of youth, of years, of himself versus all else.

That is what he did last year, too. That is what I remember. Only now it is a story, not just a sight.

We parked the bike and walked up and down the main street of the quaint and lovely town. We got sandwiches--"the second best grilled cheese I've ever had, Mom!" [do you remember the other?]--and walked down toward water's edge of a glistening lake. I took my feet out of my riding boots and cooled them in the grass as we ate, at the foot of the statue of an Indian, in James Fennimore Cooper territory. As we headed back to the bike, ice cream was promised for later (as it always must). In a few more minutes, we were there.

Up the circular drive, to sit idling under the portico. Sliding glass doors, nurses entering and leaving, checking their watches. An empty wheelchair waits. I turn to my boy. "Through these doors we came, eleven years ago, and you breathed your first breath of the outside air." I could see it all suddenly then: the trepidatious mother, hand tight on the car seat in which her baby was strapped, watching through the glass for the arrival of the gray Toyota. And then . . . outdoors, into our new life.

It was as if it were yesterday, but also someone else's life I had watched in a movie. O strange disjunction of time and events!

My son did not feel all these things last Friday, as he of course could not. They were mine alone, because they were his. The road had not yet moved all the way through him. Someday it would, and this moment in this land would finally come to have a story. That is when he will remember.

We pulled out of town. In a little while we were in the place I wished I could tell him about, the place we had lived before and after his birth, the place where every road was known, every byway had something to tell me about who I had been, and who I was not now.

If Wishes Were Horses

Sometimes you'd wish something so hard it felt as if something inside you might break. As if wishing it would bring it into being, changing all of history behind you. And you, sitting on the fulcrum of this world, could change the years to come because you changed yourself.

That is the way it was with me, in the days I wished I was an Indian.

I looked into the mirror, at my shiny dark hair. Hey, that could mean I'm an Indian! I looked at my family, and decided that since they didn't "understand" me (who could?), it meant I was adopted. Oh, how I wanted to be adopted! That would explain everything, and also give me the hope of what I wanted to believe: that I bore in my veins the blood of the noble, true people. I wandered the woods collecting things of the woods; I spent hours alone there, imagining being captured, or capturing in return. I walked with my toes in, as I was informed the Indians did, in order to move silently through the woods.

All summer long--oh idyllic Ohio summer!--I went barefoot. (Do children still do this today, or is it another sensuality lost, the heat on the sole, the gravel ouch, the cooling grass?) And when I came home, my parents called me Melissa Blackfoot.

Did they know how much I wanted this to be true? Their joke was my dearest hope.

The Blackfoot people, of the area that is Montana and Alberta, Canada, were the "Indian" Indians--they were the ones with the tepees. They used dogs to pull travois, until they were introduced to horses in the early eighteenth century. These they called "elk dogs."

The Blackfeet had the honor of becoming the first natives killed by the encroachers who called themselves Americans, but were not. At first trusting of the Europeans, they soon realized, as did all their confreres, the trust was misplaced. When they learned the men of the Lewis & Clark expedition had traded guns to their enemy tribes, the Shoshone and Nez Perce, they attempted to steal the guns back. One warrior was killed.

They believed that each day, it was a perfectly new sun that climbed over the eastern horizon. How profound a philosophy, how purifying a therapy, this is has only dawned on me now.

I did not know any of it when I was a child who wanted to be an Indian, but was merely a little savage. Indeed, if I had, the flames of desire to be one of them would no doubt have burned hotter. Murder and injustice--now there was something I could really have wrapped my imagination around.

Digressive

For twenty-five years, reading the New York Times every day was as close as I got to religious observance. Usually by the time the coffee pot was empty, the last page had been turned.

Sometime in the dawn light it had been thrown against the apartment house door--thwap--in the blue plastic bag that found second use as the ideal urban dog waste bag. The contents of every street-corner garbage can in the city was at least half composed of knotted blue bags.

Then we moved to the sticks, and had to drive to get the paper. So we did. Every day of the week. Sometimes it was sold out, so we just drove farther until we found it. When we moved to a more civilized part of the sticks, it was again delivered, to the end of a long drive, but still before we woke. I had a small child by then, therefore I couldn't read it in the morning. And so it became the pre-bedtime ritual. As with all rituals, it served many masters: desire, need, addiction. I sort of knew what was going on in the world then; I felt the need to know. Not that the Times is everything: it has a smarmy self-congratulatory residue all over it; its idea of "balanced" journalism is to counterpose obvious truths against fringe lunatic views, just so there are opposites presented; it is clearly in thrall to its advertisers (one is never going to read an expose of fur farming or diamond mining in its pages). It made me mad as hell. But I was used to mainlining it. I had to go to the Guardian to find out what was really going on in the world--it was astonishing to read in its pages stuff, even stuff our own country was doing, that never reached the paper of record.

I don't read it anymore. The paper version is not delivered in my neighborhood (jeez, moved again), and I simply can't read it online. I haven't got the hang. The paper does not crinkle in my fingers; the sections don't look the same. My ritual has been deconsecrated.

But people still send me links, because they're still reading that paper. The one I got the other day was to Jonathan Franzen's op-ed piece about loving and technology. Or maybe it was about life's pain and the horror of blind consumerism. Then again, maybe it was about sadness and narrative. I wasn't entirely certain, by the time I got through. But I was clear on one thing: Like the bags the paper came in, the piece had been recycled (it was written as a college commencement address). A writer of his stature is simply not going to get paid once for a piece. Not when he can double- or even triple-dip.

Although it never said so directly, that is what I suspected about his recent essay in The New Yorker. It was about the death of his friend David Foster Wallace. It was also about revisiting the site upon which Robinson Crusoe was based, as a way to discuss the novel. Oh, and it was about loneliness and, tangentially, stupidity. Also about birdwatching as a way to order the world. (I didn't believe for a moment, though, that he "just went" to the island to get away and get his head straight: a writer of his stature doesn't do anything without intending, first and foremost, to write about it. What do you want to bet he'd inked the contract with the magazine well before he started looking for flights? That was the one thing--perhaps the only subject of central importance--that didn't make it into the article, though it hung over the entire thing for me.) He cycled around all manner of material. And when he was through, he double-dipped. Yes, folks, he sold the movie rights.

I am not griping here about Franzen. I do not find it a problem when writers recycle their blue bags. I never bought the idea (as you can certainly tell) that one piece of writing should contain only one idea. Instead, I know all too well that when you set out on one track, the cars sometimes get switched onto another track. That is, quite literally, life. I started in one place, then moved to another, and another, and another. (How many of us are still living in the same place we were born, much less living in the same head?) I think one thought, and it takes me to another, and another, and another. Sometimes I return to my starting point, sometimes I have no interest in going back there at all, because I've been drawn to something far more interesting.

Digressions are life. Or maybe life is digressive. Let me think about which. For now, I return to the beginning, though not the beginning of this--I'm no longer thinking about the New York Times. Writing takes you on a one-way track to elsewhere; the only problem I had with Franzen's essays, I realize now, is that he tried to tie it all back up into a single subject, which felt to me a bit like pandering. Profound ideas will not be circumscribed, even if they will cohere.

Years ago, I started writing here about one subject. But then life came along and threw a firecracker on top of my head, and blew the one idea to bits. Those are still widely scattered. Now, I've decided I like them that way. I can follow their trail, which takes me away from the place I began.

Chance Brings Us Here

There was the sense of flying: air uplifting, lightening the weight of the body, and wings given by the engine below, just forward of the seat. And I wasn't really in the seat, or even on it. It was just a suggestion of a support. For a moment it was only me, a body detached, flying through the air of the Berkshires. Cresting a rise in the road, a voice cried from within: You are so lucky!

Lucky to be riding roads through a world still so beautiful as this one, lucky to be in this company, lucky to be at the endpoint of a thousand events (man's creating, odds after odds after odds, a machine such as this; three hundred years of English expatriates and their succeeding lineage grooming this landscape; all of history meeting in one impossible moment of a spring Sunday with me sitting at its very peak).

How I came to meet these people--a friend from twenty years and two lives ago; a new friend met by chance two years before, because a mention and a moment seized (and not that other one, or for that matter any of the dozens of possible others); another new friend who, though rarely seen because of distance and whatnot, still feels ineffably close--is either impossible to calculate, or is the only thing that could have happened.

***

Just because unexplainable things happen does not mean we need to find an unexplainable cause to explain them.

***

Lately I have been having conversations with several girlfriends who are desperately unhappy with their situations. Money troubles press in, or else money is not a problem, but there seems to be no time in the day, in the week, for anything but taking care of houses and children and husbands--Did I get a degree in English in order to make endless grilled cheese sandwiches and deal with car repairs and home renovations and arguments over how long he needs to be away for work? My only response to this unanswerable lament came a few weeks ago, when I found myself riding through a small backwater near here, one that oppressed me for the entire length of the red light during which I was trapped in it, when I realized, "Hey, I should remind them we could have been born in Wawarsing. We'd never have gotten out alive." There would have been no regrets that we could have done something with our fancy-college degrees, because that would have never presented itself as an option. Like our parents and grandparents before us, we would have graduated high school with a couple of babies already, and no chance to climb the stairs to see above the low roofs of our small place in life.

I could have been born in Wawarsing. But I wasn't.

To what do I owe the extraordinary luck of being born where I was, into a life that was nothing but an ever-rising staircase? Born into the extraordinary way the dice fell, clattering on the tabletop: doubles.

It would be more seemly to post here the results of my 2010 tax return, or my preferences in horizontal activities, than to delineate my beliefs on the existence of any higher power, but thinking on the vagaries of life does not make me feel entirely polite. So, the stone atheist finds herself sometimes bemused to the point of exasperation when she thinks in private on this subject. The only thing that gives pause to the forward march of her certainty is the fact that many people of far greater intelligence are equally convinced that she is wrong. She must be missing something, because it all seems quite simple to her. Anything that can think, will, or conceive must needs have a brain. A brain is a physical entity that evolved in vertebrates and some invertebrates. It is composed of cells. Although the universe is more filled with mysteries of which we know nothing than of discoveries we comprehend, it still seems impossible that a nameless something, even as great a one as god, could express a motive without having a brainstem. Where might this all-powerful mind be hiding its neurons? They would have to be very large.

Yet to me the mind-blowing complexity of everything is easily explained by a single phenomenon, one that does not require physicality: chance. Beautiful, awe-inspiring chance. It was by grace of this supreme mechanism that my particular conglomeration of flesh, will, and bones was poised atop a hideously complicated machine of German origin on this particular day in the company of others who came together by such an elaborate series of luck that it defies everything, or nothing.

***

A friend's daughter was occupying herself with a book in the Where's Waldo series. In these books, each spread is an intricate, impossibly detailed eye-twister of an illustration. In each, you are supposed to find the little figure of Waldo, but he is so well hidden sometimes you never do. You have to give up, or go mad. "I couldn't find Waldo on this page at all," she tells me. "I mean, look at it!" Indeed, there is no way to find Waldo among the many hundreds of Waldo simulacra peppering the page. "So I turned away. And then when I turned back, guess what? I had put my thumb right on him."

***

At a gas stop, while we briefly shared (helmets off to talk) the separate but combined experience that is the group ride--such luck as this!--I heard my phone ringing. It was another new friend, at the end of his own ride in the same state but for another, far more epic, purpose. Riding has many, many purposes. He had attained a difficult and hard-won goal, well over a thousand miles in under twenty hours. He told me of another rider, on a similar but possibly more difficult quest during the same day and night (a twenty-four-hour rally) who had hit two deer at different times in the same ride. On hitting the first, he stayed up. Only to then hit the second, which brought him down. What were the chances of that? And he was able to get to the awards ceremony, so he was lucky. But he hit the deer, so he was unlucky. Both at once.

There would be no way for me to comprehensively explain how it was that I came to be sitting at a picnic table outside The Creamery in Cummington, Massachusetts, with a collection of old and new friends on a collection of old and new bikes at two in the afternoon on May 22, 2011. I could have been in Wawarsing, watching my great-grandkids. I could have been in Delhi (India, not New York), bent over a washbasin. I could have been an amoeba. But for one thing: luck. Incredible, inconceivable, inexplicable, beautiful luck. In the absence of anything else, I'll take it. I have to. Because the world hadn't ended the day before.

This World

I had forgotten about them. Until they sent their beams out to my eye, and caught it fast. The wild columbine is blooming at the edges of the woods. One would almost think (would love to believe) that they are there, within easy reach of our too-limited sight, for our surprise: a remembrance that beauty persists. Or so we can only pray.

As Nelly ran on, toward the siren call of a scent hidden at the base of some bushes--the terrible rictus of some dead beast greeted me, sharp teeth smiling from a mat of brown fur, in which my dog was joyfully rolling to daub herself with that inimitable perfume of rottenness--I was thinking about the impossibility of flowers. It suddenly came to me: Do we deserve flowers?

Just as quickly, the other part of my brain (the one that answers dumb rhetorical questions with a sneer) answered, They're not for us, silly. We are merely collateral beneficiaries. Their existence, and all their strange, complex gorgeousness, is for themselves.

As I walked farther down the road, having enticed (ok, pulled her by the collar away) Nelly from her particular Chanel No. 5, I found myself spiraling down into a pretty awful funk. I had recently seen world population projections for 2050, and a flash of angry red blinded me for a moment. It was a selfish anger, of course: I would likely not be around then, to witness the final shovelful of earth hitting the coffin of the world I had known and loved--but my child would be. In fact, he will be the same age I am now. And therefore he will not have the chance to walk down a road, near his own house, so lightly traveled that his dog can run ahead, so lightly used that he might go a mile without the scent of exhaust in his nostrils, and the mean wind whipped by a speeding greedmobile. (I know: yes, I own one. We all do, because we have constructed a society in which it's nearly impossible to live without one. No matter how much one hates them.) He will not have the wild columbine (translucent rose shading to yellow, a gilded crown for wood nymphs to wear in their revels at dusk), because there will be no woods left. Here, a mere two hours from one of the world's greatest metropolises, the fields and streams and forested hills will be stripped of all they are. To become a continuation of a single suburb, wall to wall with us.

Lately I've been dipping into a fascinating book on the science of love and romance, and from it it's clear that we possess one highly complex and powerful apparatus to ensure our survival. The tip of the iceberg is the plumage of the female of our species, done up in bustiers and what are appropriately known as f**k-me shoes. Everything we are drives to one thing, and one thing only. It's highly successful, and it puts to shame the intent of the flowers: pollinate me, they whisper to the birds and the bees, with their come-hither colors and alluring shapes. We will beat those flowers yet.

My hypocrisy knows no bounds other than the one that ends at the tip of my nose. After all, I procreated too, as I was made to do.

I turned to walk back home, after greeting the fuzzy darlings of the Canada geese, waddling yellowly after mom and dad (another success story in the population wars), and then I thought: We are running out of road. (That is in fact the title of the informative environmental website of a friend of mine; it is irredeemably true, but the scary thing is, none of us--from Malthus to Al Gore--knows exactly when. We are somewhere in the middle of a horror movie, but we don't know the moment at which the killer is going to burst through the basement door.) This road, the one I am on. And that road, the one that takes us all to the end.

Girl Cave

The concept of the man cave is one I get. I really, really get it. Indeed, I even appreciate it: it's pretty funny. It pokes gently at the core truth of those simple, primitive desires of many men--all I need, mate, is my machines, a pretty calendar to lay my eyes on every now and again the kind with nice headlights if you know what I mean, the calming scent of gas in the air, and enough time to work on my grease manicure--at the same time it's bizarrely pre-feminist, and a touch repellent for that. It posits women as the enemy, the perennial naggers who need to be escaped.

I am here to tell you, though, it's women who need a girl cave. Upstairs or down, there's nowhere to run: the dust bunnies mock you (they have a particularly wheedling voice, too), the Lego-strewn boy's room weeps, the stovetop begs, the stack of permission slips, applications, bills, and plans looks dourly on: I bet you're not going to deal with me today, either? I thought so.

No, we're going to the Girl Cave, where we can escape into a world of relative order (admittedly because there is simply less stuff than in the main house) and where there's supposed to be dirt, so we don't ever feel a duty-shirker here. Some kitty litter on the oil stains, a quick broom, et voila. Peace, quiet, and motorcycles. Oh, and whatever's playing on the college radio station. It comes in on the radio in the Girl Cave, though not in the house. Magic, eh?

This is my secret world. There's the Lario on the right and the Teutonic Hornet on the left, ready for an oil change. (Unseen behind them, under its black shroud, is a friend's old Kawasaki, awaiting resurrection after two years--oh, what a day that will be, anticipation growing with each new arrival of parts in envelopes and boxes.) I love my small collection of parts and tools and fluids; I love that they stand at attention on the shelves, patiently waiting for their moment. I rarely get rid of anything so long as it has once belonged in, around, or on a motorcycle. This is therefore a museum of my own making, of my particular history. (To throw a piece of it away would be like, say, disposing of a letter my father wrote me when I was away at school. Never. A part of him, and of us.) Also, you never know when something might come in handy. The weirdest odds and bits can be just the things you need--they are comforts for the future. Who, for instance, would have thought that I'd ever have a Lario again? Certainly not me. But in the bottom of the toolbox I find some bolts and sockets that fit only her.

This is where I escape--from the place that would hold me back, on a Sisyphean slope where the same household tasks, done, must be redone upon the morrow. This is where I escape--to the place of wishful dreaming and forward motion.

How can you tell this is a girl cave? Here's a hint: see the chandelier?

More and More

Why is it that I don't exactly feel gleeful about a death this week?

I am aware that no one, including me, wants an outline of my half-baked opinions on the subject of the most notable death of recent days. For one thing, the evidence speaks for itself--and when we read between the lines, we find there a strong comment on the disingenuousness of the official statement. Of course; it's an official statement. That's its nature, eliding and eluding the exact truth. (A "firefight"? Not the word I'd use.)

For another, I don't know half enough to expound knowledgeably on this subject. I understand that a million other bloggers have already endlessly discussed the proper way to react to this news--with joy? With regret? With some manufactured, thoughtful admixture thereof?

I only know that right now I feel something a little sick and uncertain. About what has really happened, and about where it will lead us. It is a vague echo of the way I felt, exponentially more powerfully, on September 11, 2001: extremely sick, and lost in an ocean of uncertainty.

The night after the most recent event, I was talking to Mom. I found myself saying, without really knowing whereof I spoke, with some degree of belligerence: "This all began a long time ago, several wars before, so that Americans can unquestioningly continue to drive their bloody Ford Explorers." That sure ended the conversation. The very next morning, I happened to be driving behind a car on whose back windshield was written in large white letters: Thank you Navy SEALs! He is dead!!!

It happened to be a Ford Explorer.

Loving can be seen as functionally analogous to killing. Give away your love, and it comes back and back. Kill, and it too returns, more and more.

Last night, I chanced to go to yoga at a new place. The instructor ended the class with a prayer. In light of the event last week, the words sent a chill, as if from beating wings, through the air. Then we went out, my son and I, to walk a labyrinth in the churchyard. Around and around we walked, toward the center somehow.

Buddhist Prayer

If anyone has hurt me knowingly or unknowingly in thought, word, or deed,
I freely forgive them.
And I ask forgiveness if I have hurt anyone knowingly or unknowingly
in thought, word, or deed.

May I be happy
May I be peaceful
May I be free

May my friends be happy
May my friends be happy
May my friends be free

May my enemies be happy
May my enemies be peaceful
May my friends be free

May all beings be happy
May all beings be peaceful
May all beings be free

It's Your Country

Last week found me wandering around the nation's capital, two small boys in tow, throwing coins into every fountain I came across. As the ceremonial font of all that we aspire to be, Washington, D.C., is replete with fountains: every building and monument is approached over some regal body of water. The better to see you, my dear. Or possibly it was all one big pool of Narcissus, appropriate for the launching pad of Manifest Destiny. Every time I threw a penny or a dime, I wished a different wish. (Covering all my bases.) I discovered I have many wishes; I had thought myself a simple person, a sort of emotional broken record, but it turns out there are many, many different hopes buried within.

Today, one of them actually came true. I wish I could remember which fountain it was that I had used for this particular wish: I would get right back on Amtrak, because there are some more unfulfilled desires I could really use fulfilled about now.

There is something spooky, unsettling, and moving all at once about the seat of our government. It is too clean, for one thing. It is too tasteful, for another. The sense of a showpiece, lavishly painted and pasted thinly on top of a huge ugly mess raked up to hide beneath, is a little disturbing. There are the parterre gardens outside the Smithsonian castle--breathtaking, so European!--and then there are, a short metro ride away, lumpy gray blankets the size of humans scattered under the entryways of commercial buildings. I walked by a guy standing stone-faced outside Chipotle holding up bumper stickers for sale: "Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution," and was on the bus to the Mall before I realized I wanted one. Moreover, I wanted the guts to do what it says. If ever we needed some flintlock muskets and the will to do what's right, it's now. It's going to be too late soon, guys. I'm not talking about dumping fictitious tea into 2011's harbor, either: How DARE they co-opt the symbol of a just revolt against a tyrannical monarchy for their own selfish, imbecilic, racist, capitalistic, wasteful, ruinous ends? It's a mockery of every dead boy left in the frozen mud of the colonies. Don't get me started.

There was a different sort of discomfiture brought on by visiting the new National Museum of the American Indian. Come, let us celebrate the marvelous culture of the people we exterminated! There's an implacable sadness in the pride and beauty of the place. The original Americans exist now in statues and symbolic corn sheafs carved of limestone, and it doesn't bother us all that much. "We are Americans." We are? I'm half Greek and half English/Irish--how about you? Then again, the cafeteria in the basement of the museum is the Mall's best-kept secret, though it was out to several hundred people by the time we stumbled on it, serving what I took to be interpretive native cuisine. My son said, "Put the world's best grilled cheese sandwich next to this one and it will taste like garbage," of the Navajo frybread grilled cheese. It was damn good, but I wondered about how the Navajo might have made cheese. With difficulty, maybe.

Yet there was, pervading it all, a thrill in the air. This belongs to us. This represents us, or at least our higher selves. The unimaginable greatness of so much collected history, art, books. The grand monuments to true democracy--something we could hope for the return of, if only we could overthrow the current government, whose form might best be called corporate dictatorship.

Through a fifty-degree rain we walked, past the ever-moving Vietnam memorial. This complete and potent monument, the foot of which was laid with wet and wilting carnations, the occasional plasticized photograph of smiling boy in fatigues taped over an etched name, achingly sad, shows us ourselves. Literally: we look into the infinite blackness of its polished face, at thousands of names, and we see them printed over the image of our own reflections. We are them. They are us. Down we walk, into the earth, into a grave; then up we go again, out of the earth, away.

Through the rain we continued, to what feels to me the greatest of all that is great in our history. Up the many steps; it is a hard walk up to the Lincoln Memorial, as it should be. It should be work to get here. You should feel it in your bones, muscle. Then there he sits, as big as he was in life. Monumental. This same little boy I'd brought to this same place five or six years ago. Then, I took him by the hand and walked to the side, where what is etched on the walls has never, in the history of words, been exceeded. I started to read to him the Gettysburg Address. I made it as far as "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here--" and there I stopped. The tears were rolling down my cheeks, and something squeezed my throat tight. This time, I did not bother. I read it to myself, and the tears fell inward. Meanwhile, the boys stared up at the gigantic marble man. They took pictures, they laughed, they ran. They were free.

Reading, Writing, and Resurrection

Recently I read the new book by Francisco Goldman, Say Her Name, a remembrance of his young wife, taken by a freak swimming accident in Mexico in her thirtieth year, and only a couple of years into their marriage. It is a hypnotic work, both because of the raw mastery of the writer, and also because of the morbid fascination such a thing exerts on the reader. We can only imagine it happening to us, such monumental loss, and we also think just reading it might perform some sort of voodoo to keep us safe from a similar terrible event ever visiting us.

But since we live and love, we are never safe. And this we know, as we read from outside of such shredding emotions that they can only truly be experienced from inside. It's all a big egg of paradoxes: happiness cracks open to reveal pain; "having" releases the possibilities of "losing."

Mentioning this on a certain social networking site that shall remain nameless started an interesting, if anxiety-provoking, dialogue among people who have never met one another. Unbeknownst to me, one of my interlocutors, whom I do not know personally, responded that he had lost his wife recently, his partner of decades. Uh-oh. Why should I even presume to say a word on subjects I know nothing of? --Because someone who knows much, much better is going to mow me down, with overpowering experience.

I recognized in his words--sent out to strangers--the undercurrent of anger, of wanting to collar anyone who chances by so that they might listen. Then to cry, "But you cannot know!" (And indeed we can't.) I recognized the offerings of despair--I drink too much; I fear I will never feel happiness again--as if to simultaneously say, "I need you to understand . . . you will never understand." I recognized the oversharing in a public place, because this is all you can do. You are alone; you don't want to be alone; your aloneness defines your grief, and may not be taken away.

We both know it will come and deny that it ever could. It is just too big. And we are faced with it daily, now that we have all these inputs, all these immediate yet distant ways of viewing the death of others on our little screens. Stalin understood (did he understand anything? yes, and no) when he famously said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." We have millions of deaths coming at us from the radio and the television while we prepare our dinners in the cocooning warmth of our kitchens, the heart of the home that is to preserve us in eternity of course.

And then it comes. Out of nowhere. Or the somewhere that is the life that we never asked for, but once it is here, we cannot imagine our way out of.

It is interesting that for some of us, life is a succession of partners. One after the other, jettisoned for some reason or another, even the "Till death do us part" as meaningless as the speed limit on a stretch of desert highway. Multiples of multiples. And for others, there is only one. What is spoken means everything: Forsaking all others. The binding of two into one not only through love (something I do not truly comprehend, the more I try), but finally in heartbeats, long years together of something heard in the other room and assumed to be there forever, since it is your heart as well.

How many times in a life can you say, "I love you" to different people before it becomes as diluted as those water drinks with which I try to trick my child into believing he's been given juice? "They don't taste like anything, Mom." How many times before the wheel of hope turns down toward disillusionment, abandonment, then back up into another new hope before we wish to take off the axle nut once and for all?

I remember, shortly after the rupture of the life that I had too blithely assumed was going to go on and on and on (the disappearing point in my own life, way off in the distance), a vision one lonesome night at the grocery store. Ahead of me, an ancient couple stood at the end of the checkout. Silently, slowly, with enormous concentration, they bagged their food. Together. He would pick up a package, hand it to her. She would reach over to hold up a handle of a bag in order to help him. I watched, rapt, stunned. It seemed the summation of partnership, and it was a sharp knife touching my throat. This is what I will never have. This is what I have lost! Or it was like falling and hitting my head against the ice. I watched with tears running down my face, the sudden slap of loss stinging and stinging.

A few days ago I wondered, aloud in type, about the obviously imperative need of a writer upon suffering the loss of a spouse to write about it. When this is your lot in life, to create things out of words, it is also your fate to re-create things out of them. To go over the details, to offer them up; in reciting the narrative of the past, to make it present again. The pain is never assuaged this way, but it is presented to us. We make of it what we will; the writer is a bit of a god, bringing momentarily back to life that which he lost. We see her there suddenly, alive, until the last page is turned.