morethanenoughtruth

The best thing of all is to be alone.  Just add up the fantasies: Farley Mowat hied himself to the Arctic, there to subsist by eating only mice, all to prove that wolves are benevolent creatures not begging lupicide.  What’s better than a tree house where a person is free to think and be whatever?  Ask any squirrel.  When there is no other to circumscribe reality, a being can be all that it truly wants to be.  My poet’s year in the Appalachian woodlands said it all for me.  As long as I could remain cabin-secure, steering clear of other humanity, the local fauna and I celebrated a gentle peace.  Whenever human society overstepped its bounds, and intruded on soul serenity, I ran.  I went to where there were no others so close to me as to assume I should be like them, think like them, define beauty like them—that was the place to be.

My Side of the Mountain is elegantly described in the book of that title: A young naturalist runs away from home and goes to live in a hollow tree with his raccoon.  He climbs a cliff, steals and trains a peregrine falcon fledgling so as a team they can hunt for food.  It’s the best of fantasies until it isn’t.   Like COVID19 which makes of every person an insular recluse, anything that drives a person to hide wrapped only in the solace of his own company is a problem: When my Uncle Wesson, chewing on his unlit cigar, undertook to find me, where was I?  Hiding under a bush of course—a good place where adult and frightful discussions might not be overheard.  When sent away to boarding school and Sister Rose Marie recoiled from my aggressive cuddling, where did I go to hide?  The attic of the convent was the perfect refuge, wrapped only in quiet cobwebs that cushioned consternation.  When my husband, Larry, and I wanted a respite from stupid corporate politics, it was waiting in a winter’s campground, where there were no bugs and no tourists.  There we found only silence and a place to remember why we had found each other in the first place.

Now with COVID running things, Larry has died a continent away in Washington State.  The surgery that would have placed a stent and might have saved him was held hostage by the logistics of the virus.  It fell under the definition of elective surgery, and as such, could not compete with others too stupid to get a vaccination and attempting to die that very day of the virus.  He finally got his surgery—too late—and departed my world.  I try to remember the things he did that made me crazy so I cannot miss him as much as I do, but it’s the delightful memories that arise, not the irritations and distractions. 

His tenor blended so sweetly with my soprano that it was pure happiness to make harmony together.  I can remember a Sunday service where we performed a duet, and I was terrified—like I always was—to be singing in front of a bunch of people.  We shared one piece of paper music, and as my hand shook, the music conjured a shimmy of its own.  That scared me even more, and I considered a dash out of the room trailing tears.  But Larry saved us.  His hand reached under mine to steady the music so that we could finish as a success.  There were tears, but they were in the congregation. They had shared our little drama, sharing our happiness.  The title of our song had been You’ll Never Walk Alone.  I didn’t—not that day.

Remembering happy times, I keep to my senior apartment, collecting comestibles once a calendar week from masked grocers and visiting a library that has re-awakened and is again lending books.  Without the food and the books I, too, would surely have given up.  The library’s new rules don’t charge for overdue returns, so I can borrow and return with equanimity.  I am like the near-sighted bibliophile in the Twilight Zone, who wakes to a world where all of humanity, save he, has succumbed.  He is left alone—triumphant—mounting a grand march up the front steps of his town library, he shouts, throws up his arms in giddy glee, and knocks off his glasses.  They tumble to the concrete and shatter.

Larry and I, matched introverts, adored our solitude, even with respect to each other.  It is a cruel and petty irony that we suffered a continent apart, in our separate sterile spaces, waiting for the virus to give up its collective tiny ghosts and leave us in relative health.  We too—separate and alone—waited to die.  Now it is I who must wait my turn to die alone.  Those friendly coronaviruses would gladly keep me company, but no thanks.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder is a wise old saying.  It knows all about Larry and me.  The same truth holds for all three of my long-suffering husbands.  I loved them all-the-better for having left them, all the more perfectly now that they are dead and gone.  Memories of shared happy times gather to remind me to value their sweet friendship and affection.

My present apartment allows pets, but only with a two hundred dollar bribe called a deposit.  Too cheap for that, I have taken up with a family of grey squirrels who populate the giant maple tree outside my balcony.  They don’t love me, but they are distinctly enamored of the plates of goodies I set out to entice them.  The landlady specifically cautioned me not to hang bird feeders, but she didn’t mention squirrel buffets.  It provides me hours of Katznjammer entertainment watching the squirrel family members compete for my offerings along with a Cardinal couple who also are asserting their rights to the feast.  Their antics remind me of my own lively kin.

The best lesson of COVID and its variants is specially designed for those of us who idealize solitude.  It is better wished for and ideated.  Experienced it leaves much to be desired.  My favorite wall art displays a ceramic oval that says simply, “PEACE.”  In this dead quiet space, un-jarred by any voice but the empty nattering of TV and Alexa, I haven’t been inspired to hang that lovely plaque advertising the romance of quietude.  Best it should hide behind my couch on the floor, where it cowers in the dark.  It should leave me to my fantasies of rambunctious family gatherings, along with memories of cringing under bed pillows, cushioning ear-drums from shrieking progeny who gallop as an intemperate horde down pristine hallways, an unruly mob of adored small persons.  These days I am left to fantasizing a furry coated cat to warm cold feet and purr away the bittersweet stillness of alone.