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The Difference
Some things come out of the blue. Not all. Some come out of the purple of Tyre, from a sudden, untouchable wisdom. From a beloved.
I was despairing, as only my particular hyperbolic, nearly-died-but-didn’t, always-slightly-terrified self can be. He heard my fear, and my resolve. He heard my action-right-now-plan-first, fast-heart, tight-breath, exhausted piloting of my body’s inexorable march through change. He knew it would not get me where I wanted to be. He knew I did not know that, except in the ossified repository of warring philosophies comprising my education, my life.
All needing a stir.
I had talked lots. He had listened. Lots. I had cried – healingly, sufficiently, clarifyingly. There was no intrusion.
He said then: ‘Do you remember the morning after we met. We were in the library of that falling-down farm house talking, coming to know each other as fast as we could, and at some point you said, “I never give up.”’
I nodded. I cherished that morning.
He went on. ’I admired then, and do now, that strength in you.
‘I also wonder if now might be the moment to embrace the difference between giving in and giving up.”
Can there be visceral, cellular conflagration of wilfulness and a rising of recognition, of disrobing and re-robing without cords? There can.
The difference between giving in and giving up.
Yes. Giving in. That bold, passive, abstruse victory. I found it first in the Quakers. I reawakened it re-reading Quaker thought this year. And as if I need finally to let it happen to me, I found it there in – from – Christopher.
Giving in is not the same as giving up.
Stepping aside to step forward.
To ease into in order to arrive.
To be in order to be.
Tyrian without tyranny.
Never Before
I grow up as you grow old. But you have never been here before, either.
My mother and I were sitting at the marble table when I said that to her one day. Of course it was there. The marble table, round and perfect for five, was where every important conversation took place in our family. It was where we drifted and settled and listened. It was where we ate sometimes, too, and had coffee; and it was where Mother played solo Scrabble and four-handed Bridge between tournaments. It was also where she had been when suddenly she leapt, in a single bound it seemed to me, from the chair to the sofa, which was where, the next day, she died. That table was full of stories.
Why she and I were there on the day I am remembering now, I am not sure. Nor am I sure what we were talking about. But I do remember saying that odd thing: ‘I grow up as you grow old. But you have never been here before, either.’ I remember that she nodded. She smiled, I think, seeming to agree, but mostly, I suspect, to acknowledge that I needed to say it. She was wonderful that way. Not everything needed to be discussed. Some things just needed to be said.
But I wish we had discussed it. I wasn’t exactly sure what I meant. But I knew I meant it. And that it mattered. So here I am at 78, an age she never reached, trying to put words to it.
I think it means that when we contemplate ourselves in this moment, we notice that we have never been here before. We have never been this age. It is all new. It is adventurous. But when we look at people older than we are, especially people much older – old people – we see only people who have already been here. We don’t think: I wonder how it is for them, being in this new place where they have never been before? They have been where I am, but they have not been where they are. They are old, and life is new.
Why don’t we notice that?
It is probably another example of the way prejudice works. It sets out to convince us that some humans are more human than others. And because, in its grip, we can, therefore, see old people as less human than we are, we do not see their experience as ours. How can it be? They are non-us people. Less-than people.
So maybe a blow against prejudice can be the decision, starting now, to see people older than we are and think, before we think anything else: I wonder how they are experiencing this never-before-been-here moment? What might the newness feel like to them? Is it the way the newness of my moment feels to me? I wonder.
Wondering is usually the first step in a stand against prejudice. ‘I wonder’ stops ‘I know’, which we never do.
Who Am I?
Part 1
1995
It is dawn in Texas. Yesterday we drove the 150 miles back from Oklahoma. Uncle Carlton had died. Aunt Geneva had died three hours later. How did she manage that? That's what I want to do.
Geneva was (and maybe still is) madly in love with Carlton Corbin who was also madly in love with her but would never say a thing about all of that. At 90 years old he still seemed to me to be on horseback, driving his prize Angus herd to Ft. Worth. Steady. Focused.
This is my heritage. Their love, his calm, his 25,000 acres of angus-roaming Oklahoma, his all-his-life doing of one thing, excellent in giant proportions, quiet, unseducibly clear. When might I learn to be quiet like that?
But I am also his sister, Edelweiss Corbin, my mother, cherishing precision, speaking after long thought, asking questions after consideration, after weighing the battles, letting a look speak, letting words penetrate, laughing, telling a story with perfect and conscious sacrificing of an occasional literal detail for a story that teaches.
Maybe Uncle Carlton was like that, too, just socially more privileged to say less because the women would say it for him.
But I am also Max Meadors. Driven. Restless. Doing the next thing, rarely pausing to be pleased, fearful somehow that the achievement will be desecrated if I look away. Focusing even dinner party talk where it will do the most good, only thinly attentive when the pleasure is aimless. A servant of some deep voice making contemplation suspect. My father.
I sit alone on this Texas porch surveying the fields and singular trees, watching geckos darting, thinking of our English garden which at this very same moment, at high noon, is voluptuous, teeming, oozing a billion scents and shapes at once, the birds mad with song. I am that, too. And I was all of that in my childhood as I created the fantasy play that was surely the blueprint for my happiness now: the handwritten letters delivered by hand on board the "ship", bound for my "love" across the "ocean," the New Mexico terracotta tiles of our long front porch serving well as the “ship's deck.” I sat, received the love letters, and “sailed on,” afternoon after afternoon, telling no one, so that it could come true 26 years later. Maybe the Corbin quiet was the seed.
I wonder what we are. I wonder what I really am.
Texas? No. Only from school days, and because my beloved sister lives here. But I can never be Texas.
I am the nine miles beyond its western edge. A vast nine miles, a whole country of change. Just over that "Caprock" the terrain transforms. That is what Edelweiss wanted: to move over the Caprock into those skies.
I am that. That New Mexico. And that house, her design; the kept-green lawns, their acre of underground pipes, and the scent and swish of late night hose-tractor waterings.
I am those skies. And I am the willowy willow tree, my toolshed-cum-fantasy-flower-shop, my one season of radishes, and all that dancing and cheerleading and suntanning practice on lawns and patios that stretched out of sight.
I am Mother listening on the sofa, alone at the kitchen window adoring the azure, at the typewriter, by the stove, beating fudge to grainless perfection, gesturing for a Coke, listening in the doorway as I practiced the piano, smiling. I am her books and Daddy's work, his saving enough for me to assume I would always be all right but not enough for me to squander, or for him ever to agree to stop earning. Never enough for certainty. But always enough for smiles and later-in-life long talks and love.
Geneva and Carlton finished that generation. People called it the end of a perfect love story. There were other love stories, though. Grandmother and Grandaddy were a famous love story, tragically ending in an accident on his 50,000 acres of Oklahoma pasture. Mother and Daddy were a love story, too. He met her on the ranch. She was 16. He was 23. “I've met the woman I'm going to marry," he wrote in his diary, "I just have to wait for her to grow up."
Aunt Corabell and Uncle Marvin, were a love story, I think, in a don’t-talk-about-it sort of way. And so were Aunt Mattie Mae and Uncle Murray. I assume Aunt Snookie and Uncle Phil, and Aunt Mary Jo and Uncle Charlie were not the same kind of story. But no one knows.
I wonder what their compromises were. I wonder when numbness was a blessing. I wonder what they had to overlook, deny, forgive, or resent and punish, over and over again. I wonder what we won't ever know.
Family history is all very well. But I prefer lore. Lore is pure enough at its core. But impure enough to favour enchantment. I prefer what I learned yesterday about Grandaddy, Uncle Carlton's muse. Will Corbin, the legend.
More on that one day.
Who we are, what we are, is complicated, isn’t it?