For someone with mobility issues which aren't proving to be as temporary as I had hoped, I got a lot accomplished during my two weeks back in the Lehigh Valley. I went to New York to see an amazing show of Phillip Guston's late paintings. I read at an open mic. I wrote the first poem I've written all year and filled three sketchbooks with cartoons. I saw Robyn Hitchcock perform. Best of all, I flew my brother in from Minneapolis to surprise my mother for her 70th birthday. I smile every time I think about her reaction when my brother sauntered into the kitchen and casually asked "What's a guy gotta do to get some coffee around here?"
I also managed to relax quite a bit. The weather was cloudy but mild, so every day I'd get my coffee and sit on the back deck and read or draw and listen to the birds. I have been such a throbbing knot of anxiety lately that I really felt like I was starting to crack. I could tell that if I didn't get a break of some sort, that something bad was going to happen. But after just a few days of lethargy, I found myself feeling calmer and healthier than I have in the past three years. I didn't try to accomplish too much, just allowed myself to space out and spend a lot of time with my mother and a few old friends.
I visited Jasmine's brother at the old Hoskins Hacienda, where he and Jasmine's old school friend Jana and I spent hours looking at one of the few remaining caches of our wee companion's paintings. It was extremely intense; both beautiful and incredibly painful. It felt like ripping a scab off of a wound that hasn't healed properly, and then probing that wound with a rusty scissors. As more pieces of the story of her collapse are revealed, the more I'm sickened by how stupid and preventable it all was. While we will never know all the details of her death and what led up to it, I have enough clues now to conjure a scenario that channels some of the more unsavory aspects of a David Lynch production. As much as I want to cling to whatever memories I still have of her, and as much as I believe in facing the truth head on, no matter how dark, I wish I could forget everything I've heard about her final moments, because they are irredeemably fucking grim.
It took me a couple of days to crawl out from the dark shadow cast by that evening at the house in the woods, but I did, and a week later Jana and I had lunch at the Italian place in Bethlehem she loved so much. Afterwards we sat on a bench in the courtyard behind the Sun Inn, reminiscing pleasantly about our dear little frenemy in a way that felt more healing than painful. Her and Jasmine's brother and I are the three who loved her the most, I think, aside from her parents, who both died swiftly of cancer, and possibly her ex-husband, whose heart remains as enigmatic as their marriage was. But looking at those wonderful paintings- all of which were done when she was in her teens and twenties, after which her output slowed considerably- I'm convinced that she really could have been a Great Artist, if only a couple hundred things would have been different. Or maybe just one thing. Regardless, she is gone, and my heart breaks every day thinking of her, wishing I could hear her laugh again, see that mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
Even at the Guston show, I couldn't completely lose myself in the art because there was a painting- one of my favorites- which I last saw nearly 18 years ago at the Met, with her by my side. And there it was again, but with her gone, it was like a huge chunk of the picture had been painted over. I found it hard to look at, and yet I stood in front of it for a long, long time.
There are plenty of other things I'd like to write about the trip, but I haven't yet been able to sift through the many emotions which inevitably accompany my trips back East. I will state the obvious and say that it is hard to watch one's parents aging, and it can challenging to enjoy what time we have together without feeling overwhelmed by a half century's worth of conflict, loss, and sometimes difficult love. But we keep trying, and sometimes we even succeed.
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