The Flame Tree

Thinking about the end of the world while walking around the Central Park reservoir last night

I take the path from the 67th Street entrance north the road through Central Park that leads to the reservoir. The road passes the Boat House and a man playing his ode to the day on bagpipes in the Boat House parking lot. The road I take passes trees and couples teaching their babies to walk under the trees. It passes behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A man throws a ball to his little dog. Not many people are passing. Rain water is dripping off the leaves of the trees and the bushes. The blossoming trees smell amazing. It's quiet because it just rained and will rain again soon, and it always raining. But at least the grass is long and lush.

I walked and thought about the end of the world. I made a list of what my last thoughts might be if today truly is the end of the world. I wondered if, in the intensity of the world ending, my mind would offer up memories that I couldn't conjure up myself now. I gave myself that possibility. I thought of the warmth and weight of my newborn just placed on my chest; the reflection of a drifting seagull on the stone house window on a grey sky in November; a friend, dying of a cancer, lifting a water bottle to spray a small plant on her hospital bed table; the smell of the grey Chevrolet, of the first German Shepherd, of the brackish ocean. Of course all the lovers would come crashing in, every one. High fives, what fun, thanks for the good times guys---see you in heaven. Then some jokes about that. 

The ledge at the office where we smoked cigarettes those first weeks in Uganda; one glance when I knew. The Chick. My brothers. Snow. A mountain in Maine. The smell of the church. I listed more as I walked and the memories flooded in---wonderful things---wonderful things by my side for the glorious instant before obliteration. 

Or will I think this----- Oh God, I am 43 years old, and I've only just started my life. 

Old Man House and Love

A few weeks ago I returned to New York City from my parents house with a van load of things including: seven glass jars, nine terra cotta jugs, a box filled with seaglass, a wooden Pegasus carved by my sculptor great-grandfather, an etching of my great-grandmother done by the same, a crate of letters written to me from 1969 to 1998 (when email obliterated the art), a twentieth-century Italian bureau, the family Bible, and a 16-year-old cat named Chicken. 

These were the random items that I hauled out of the deep waters of my past---excavated out of the old house where we grew up and my parents have lived for 40 years. We packed them into the rented van early on a beautiful crisp sunny morning. I said goodbye to my parents. Though I will see them in a few weeks, I will never see them at this house again, because I will never see this house again. I waved goodbye to them as I pulled out of the driveway, as I have waved goodbye so many hundreds of times before-----for school mornings, for sleepovers and ski trips, for boarding school, college, graduate school. As I left for California, Central America, New York City and Africa. I waved goodbye to attend a day of second grade with the same combination of dismay and excitement as 25 years later I waved goodbye with my new baby girl, going to Kenya to start another, new life. But this goodbye was the most significant, as it was the last one from this driveway and this house and as I drove away---- I will not lie---- the pain was tremendous. 

I will miss that house because it's a sweet old man of a house. Old, warped and achey, settled into the rocky ground, unfazed by the range of bizarre human behavior and glee that unfolds within it. I will miss that beautiful familiar gentle house, but nothing has been lost----and that's the peculiar, almost vertiginous feeling I'm living with. The house is gone, but there are millions of other houses.

The house is gone but our home remains, because we really do create home within, and create it everyday. My home is our family. And my family is a phone call or an email, a gift of green earrings or black pearls, a drive up to Boston together, a conversation by the kitchen sink, jokes, a snow fort, a movie, a really strong drink when a really strong drink is in order. It's the infinite crackling of the space between us, alive and unpredictable, shifting with every member's move, with every new arrival, with every loss. All of that still remains, and the memories too. So what is there to long for? We are lucky.

"Love conquers all," the priests and the poets keep telling us----and it's an abstraction until you learn that it does actually conquer all, because no one can destroy love, and love can be as simple as you calling your brother. The crackling space can't be cut down, or harassed, intimidated, chased by a car, threatened or yelled at by anyone. They can hang you upside down but the love remains. That must be so annoying for the bad guys. I am beginning to get it now, I really am.