The Perils of Augustine, Rousseau, Proust and A Fault In Our Stars - all in one week

Last night, I gave into the temptation to wallow. Brian and I watched, The Fault in Our Stars. From the first few minutes in, I found myself shocked at how different the experience of a camera, as a narrator, would make the entire story. My favorite device the author uses is a book within a book, where the characters encounter the phrase, “Pain demands to be felt.” What could be more true? Perhaps, the corollary that “Love demands to be given?”

When I read the book, on a transcontinental SFO to JFK United flight, I didn’t shed a single tear. Although I prefer to pretend otherwise, books and movies make me cry. I have been known to be the really unstable bawling and sniffling chick with the cashmere turtleneck pulled up to her eyes in 7B (more than once). What makes me different than the typical really unstable bawling and sniffling chick with the cashmere turtleneck pulled up to her eyes in 7B is that I am reading something Stiglitz wrote about income inequality and remain happily married.

There I sat, on my blue sofa, in a ratty t-shirt, shocked when the tears streamed down my face. I discovered one of the reasons I hate crying has nothing to do with losing control, fearing vulnerability, or being told that no one likes a cry baby. It’s that the physical sensation of crying is horrible.

My body heats up. I feel claustrophobic in my own skin. I sweat. This is not polite glowing. A salty stream of sweat stings my invariably slightly sunburned neck, creeping down my chest, where it becomes cold,  forcing me to notice that its reached my navel. My “rosy” face becomes purple and the whites of my eyes turn pinkish red. To complete the image, my nose runs a hot, clear, liquid and I never have a tissue.

The reaction I was having was not to watching two star crossed lovers, but to knowing that people die leaving things unfinished.  All those meals never eaten, songs left unsung, chances to choose kindness missed, sunsets unwatched, babies' laughter unheard. Yet, if we are there and eat those meals, sing those songs, watch the sunsets and make the babies laugh, we bring the lost along with us. We never stop loving people when they die. That is our privilege -  to live with their love. That remains. And it gives us hope.

My apologies, I re-read Augustine, Proust and Rousseau for a class over the past week – this can’t continue much longer. I can barely stand myself. God, forgive us our pretentiousness, we know not the boredom it causes.

Listening to Gabriel's Oboe

Today I listened to Gabriel's Oboe over and over. It’s the theme from the film, The Mission. When I made my confirmation, it was required viewing. Rarely does a film pack so many questions into one story. My mother and father saw it the theater. She recalls the two of them walking New York’s streets for hours afterwards. Neither of them had words for it. Instead, they walked in saturated silence.

The story is of a Spanish mission that thrived in the Amazon during Colonial times. It’s success threatened authorities both governmental and clerical.  The powerful never falter in their desire to squash the truly free. It is their greatest fear. When it comes time to defend the mission, two priests fight alongside the native people. One fights by sword, the other by prayer. For both of them, the truly good sought fairness in all things, opening themselves to criticism and ostracism in their quest for right. Often, the free, possessing a power of a different nature, fail. Neither man survived.

I can’t imagine the film without it’s score. Music tells the story through dense emotions, those we never named.  It’s record filled our Upper East Side Apartment for weeks. The opening mimics the first sound after the quiet heard at sunrise. It floats as more instruments join, each creating a different chill and charge. Then, the chorus perfects the pieces, coming just shy of exploding and destroying it. Nuance at its most raw. The build up reminds me of the promise tomorrow brings when today feels wasted. But no effort is ever wasted, no kindness to small to matter. Daddy taught me this. Mommy perfected it.

Music makes visceral memory. Bow over string transports me through time even more than the smell of the beach.  At times, I believed I could smell my father on a wave of sound. When something amazing plays, I still do. Sound wraps around my shoulders. It rests against my back and squeezes my ribs. When I look up, no one is there.

My father’s best friend, Peter, said it best. “We went to a Irish bar on the East Side – a dark, smoky place. We drank and listened to Irish War ballads, not quite like Tommy Clancy. It was the most moving experience I ever had in my life. I’ve searched for years to find that music.” To search is to know you still love.

Before Ellie was born, Brian and I traveled to South East Asia. In Hoi An, a beach town in Vietnam, I woke up before dawn. I sat outside with a camera and watched the world wake up. Fishermen put out to sea in round, wicker boats. A mother held her baby in her lap. They clapped together. The quiet was perfect.  It is in quiet that we build connections with another.

These images and moments are so complete unto themselves; they seem impossible in worlds of noise and glowing screens. But it was this world of moments and images that I inhabited with Daddy. Our time was uninterrupted. When we were together, we belonged in a world entirely of our own making. Only recently did I learn that I can go there whenever I wish, but the ticket is always round-trip and I travel there alone.

Being of the sea and the surf

The metal arm of my beach chair clunks against my back. It's one millimeter from painful. White sand sticks to the sweaty skin on the back of my calves. Only the breeze from the waves cuts through the 97% humid Long Island summer air. Behind the haze, the sun burns longing to reveal a clear periwinkle sky.  It’s a perfect day. It's a day I've seen hundreds of times before, but it never ceases to save me.

I drop the chair and my enormous canvas bag filled with towels, books, sunscreen and the remnants of my daughter's late afternoon snack from yesterday. I remove my obscenely over-priced red coral beaded tunic to reveal an ultra-conservative black skirted swimsuit. My chair squeaks as it unfolds with a little extra push. I flop down onto the chair and open my father's mid-shipman's log. That's why I'm here - to discover someone I lost or never knew. Me.

Whenever I felt awful growing up, the beach was salvation. After anyone died, I found freedom here. My mother brought me here when I couldn't look at other children with their fathers at a camp barbecue. I sat on the roof of a surfboard shack in the 30 degree wind until I could feel nothing else when my high school boyfriend and I finally called it quits.  It’s like leaving the planet for a little while. No one can touch you. 

To find escape, you walk down a long white path of wooden boards through a field of beach grass. Behind you is a beach club with shouting children, a frigid swimming pool and the smell of fat burning on a grill. Ahead of you is white sand, grey-green-blue-ocean and a fuzzy horizon line - the edge of the world. Even though it’s only about 500 steps to the breaking waves, it feels like miles. Once you’re there, in your beach chair, under a blue and white umbrella, reading and re-reading sea-spray damp pages of your book through sunglasses dirtied by fingerprints absorbing fog, you are somewhere else. Alone and comfortably lonely. Here, for just a little while, you are free of everything behind you, free to inhale whatever emotion sits on your chest. There is no judgment, just being.

Daddy and I came to the beach even in the off-season. I remember a clear October day. Mommy was probably stuck packing up the summer house. We went out onto the sand, took off our Reebok sneakers and white tube socks, rolled up our jeans, pulled up our hoods to block the wind, and ran. We ran in endless lines of tire tracks left on the sand. He was ahead of me, running toward the jetties, which are now visible only out in the water. As he ran, his body shrunk and shrunk until, he dissolved into the mist. I panicked. As tears streamed from my eyes, I willed my legs, scratching against my rolled up Osh-Kosh jeans to push through the sand as my feet sank further with each step.

“Daddy!”

He was right there in front of me, but I couldn’t see him obscured by mist, sun and sand blowing in the wind.  I reached into the mist, running faster with my arms open, until he ran back to scoop me up into his arms. Even then, I knew that loss was the inevitable outcome of life. 

That’s why I’m here, back in this small town on the Atlantic Ocean. I've come and gone, moved from the green woods of the mid-Atlantic, to the jungle heat and bugs of the  Deep South, to the face-splitting cold of the Midwest, to the twilight-at-noon-light of Northern California. But, it is only here, where the surf burns my ankles from the cold, that I am not running away. For as long as I can remember, I felt like a story lived inside me, hidden and unwritten. That story is who I am, who I am meant to be, and how I enter the world.

As I read through his Midshipman's log, five yards from the breaking surf, I know that this is finally real. As I see Ellie, learning to be of the beach and sea, I am finally sure I’ve saved a part of him and carried him into the world for as long as she and I live.