i'd gotten an email from a man that i used to work for several years ago. He would be coming through Socorro on his way from Colorado to Arizona. He and his wife are moving again.
Would i have breakfast?
we have kept in touch over the years, his wife sends a holiday newsletter at Christmas. Now and then i update them about here, how that Toyota Pickup is doing so Great....they're the ones who gave it to me when they moved to Colorado. Somewhere in this last year an email told me that he had been diagnosed with 4th Stage Melanoma. 3 places in the brain, then his tongue. That he would be having laser surgery and then a new chemotherapy. He's 82. Since then i had been included in group updates. In the last month or so he has been told he is cancer Free. There is no sign of it.
I drove into town to the restaurant not knowing what to expect. Haven't seen him in maybe 4 yrs? and now after all this,
And there he was. Him self. The same him as always. Fit, energetic, happy, like always. We took an hour for breakfast, he had a long drive still ahead, and on the way home and since, i thought about how it went. About how the time was Full with conversation, and still, so much left unsaid, unshared. I thought about how each of us had somehow spontaneously told our Story without thinking, it just came forth, sometimes keying off something the other said, sometimes a switch in topic, but somehow our minds kept the story coming, somehow choosing amidst the many possibilities which stories to tell, which things we found important about those stories and somehow without thinking we said them aloud to each other. We didn't talk about the past, except very recent past, we didn't talk about the Future, really, either. We expressed who it is we are in the moment. I talked about the goats and Tay. He is interested. He talked about his dog who was waiting outside and i had the chance to meet and then talked about trying to convince his Episcopal church to "certify" him as somekind of spiritual counselor...a LOT of training....which he did.....to men in prison. Things like that.
and now it's over. and i think about it. What we chose to tell.
Mo gave this link yesterday. as did Terri Windling. An essay in the New Yorker of Keith Ridway in August of 2012.
"....Everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones...they are characters you have created. You have a perception of the way things are and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience....with our senses and our nerves....is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos."
the opposite of Jude, i find Naming something i just don't do. When i put Cloths in the shop, i need to give them some kind of identifier and i work at it.
but here...this is The Garden of the Imagination. it came of it's own accord, this "name" and it is sure and Good. The Garden of the Imagination. It's all tentatively basted in place, waiting for how it will go. I like it very much.
