keeping abreast | keeping a breast

I read a perspective piece by a colleague today, Jess Housty from the Heiltsuk First Nation. Talking about salmonberries and people and salmon, the interconnectedness, the mutuality and reciprocity being as evident as the taste of the cool salt spray coming off the north Pacific.

I miss that place.

In COVID, while I miss less suffering for so many, I don’t miss much else. I’m privileged that way.

But I miss British Columbia. Those salmonberries, the dank smell of rotting salmon, their nutrients being carried off by bears and wolves and eagles and martins deep into the woods, decaying into the moss and ferns, and into the wet humus only to be returned as salmonberries, sustenance for people. A good salmon run means a good salmonberry run means a good salmon run. And the circle is unbroken.

I sit and watch this nature film narrated by David Attenborough, these three minutes of the brightest boldest frogs I’ve seen, wrestling and leaping and engaging in a stand off with their black beady eyes. These frogs, smaller than my index finger, now larger than life on the big screen.

And I know how many hours of filming that took, sitting in steady drizzle – at times downfall – of rain, hands numb, nose running, always checking the equipment to make sure it’s not fogged up and the batteries are charged and the zoom captures the moment and the light is bright enough to pick up on their spots. It could be days waiting to catch the 25 seconds of the frogs in action, fighting with their long limbs and their toxic masculinity for what the narrator calls “his space,” contenders in the mating game, the sole and urgent goal to exist into the future and procreate. It is worth the wait.

What does this have to do with British Columbia?

It reminds me of the hours I’ve spent quietly still on bear stands, or sitting at the side of a rushing creek on a sharp rock in waders. Downwind enough for them to not be spooked but upwind enough for them to not be spooked. Hacking my way through along the water’s edge, avoiding grabbing a fistful of spiky devil’s club when I start sliding towards the riverbank. Snacking on salmonberries along the way.

The reward – if we’re lucky – is a glimpse of the spirit bear, the rare white bear that is made of legends, literally, passed down through a recessive gene and through the oral histories of all the Indigenous Nations in that central coast pocket in the garden of eden.

It was one particular day, after a few long days in community, hanging out with Guardians on their watchmen patrols, doing stream sampling, counting fish, counting whales, counting boats, spending time gigging for rockfish, planning for oil spill incidents and vessels in distress, listening to the grannies, feasting on the season’s bounty – the herring eggs on boughs of cedar and canned spring salmon and fresh halibut and eulachon grease – liquid gold to my hosts. We motored up into a small bay, its feeder creek barely visible save but for a slight break in the canopy. Anchored and hopped out into the estuary, waded up to shore, up the side of the flowing water, light starting to angle west, not nearly golden hour but we could see that was coming.

We got to a spot, got quiet, got still. The last day here. Maybe, just maybe, we’d see one.

And we did.

A Madonna. White, strong, thick fur. Ambling downstream, sniffing the air, aware of our small cadre of people, but paying no mind to us. Her two black cubs scrambling after her, chirping at each other, wrestling, one treeing the other for a few minutes before they scampered down after mom.

She went across the stream and settled in, keeping a clearing of trees between us so that we had each other in full view.

And her babies followed.

Nestled up next to her, both started nursing.

Time stood still.

What has taken some a lifetime, took me some luck. Some give. Some mutuality.

I miss that place.

You know that feeling, when you wake in the middle of the night, and the full moon has snuck through the sliver of open space between the curtain and the Victorian window molding? You are awake because the light, a mirror from the sun countless miles away, is reflecting so brightly from the moon onto your face, through your eyelids, down your elevator of consciousness, stirring you from the dark depths of the bottom back up, eyes now open, gaze gently directed, curious, comforted, toward the window.

Hello, moon.

This delicious moment, just the moon and me communing. I have her all to myself. I nuzzle into my sheets and bathe in the glow.

The still and quietness of the bedroom, the house, the city, the latitude, all cloaked in a thin string of darkness except for what she offers us, for the willing, the awakened, the night shifters, the insomniacs, the nursing mothers, the grievers, the drifters.

Because in a few minutes more, the angle will be just so, now passed by that inverted isthmus of space where she greets me, greets us. Don’t leave me moon.

Goodbye, moon.

It was like a bolt of lightning hit me when I stepped into the shower today. I froze. I don’t know how long it lasted, but I was in my own dream space, realizing that if my Aunt Judy dies, or when she dies, that generation of Calcari’s, the one above me, is gone. The last blood connection next to and above my dad, his parents and great aunts and uncles, most cousins that we can still identify on a first-name basis, all gone. All the family history, lore, musings, tidbits, recipes, portals to other worlds, continents and times, cremated into the atmosphere or buried into the earth. Who will remember our stories.

Have I taken the time to ask Judy the things, like I thought I did with my dad, only to realize the second after he breathed his last breath, that there would always be more questions? Forever be more questions? No way possible to transmit a lifetime of living between us. Would she – the forever young, master dodger of anything serious, always playing practical jokes on everyone, telling stories of when she dumped over the outhouse on the nuns before deciding herself to join the convent in a radical act of defiance at age 18 – would she even give me 30 seconds of a serious answer? Probably not. Which brings me sorrow while I also smile.

The picture I received via text today of Judy in the hospital made me do a double-take. I thought it was my dad, their likeness striking as they aged.

These recipes, from grandma Calcari and Aunt Dell, making rabbit stew, a red gravy, served piping hot over polenta. Pillows of gnocchi. Trays of lasagnas. Pheasant and other birds in there for good measure too.

I will never know those like they dad and Judy knew those.

I try and think though about what I do know, what I do remember. Because it’s those memories of my dad and his family that are likely going to be the only ones my daughter has of this lineage. My memories. And I will work so hard to tell them all to her, savoring the details, the visuals in my mind’s eye, the ways things smelled or the laughter in a full house of more than 20 people for all the holidays, the temperature getting so hot that we’d open up windows even in the middle of an Illinois winter. I hope that somehow, they become her memories. Because they are a source of joy.

I can see it. I was coming off some surgery or treatment, and my parents were visiting to help, cooking, cleaning, and driving me to and from doctors. But we tried to do at least one thing that got us out of the house while they were here. Or maybe it was a separate time they visited, us wanting them to have a true vacation that didn’t center around caregiving for me. But not wanting to push with my dad’s treatments, what would cause him pain and discomfort along his spine or his femur. Either way, we went to the farm where we get our weekly fruits and vegetables, up in Winters, CA outside of the wind and fog of the coast and into the dry Sacramento valley. It was a farm day, the harvesting of strawberries being the prime event for all the families there. We could pick the berries if we wanted – eating as we went, buckets in hand stained red and sticky with sugar, the berries already starting to macerate in their own juices. But mostly, we sat in lawn chairs between the rows dripping with strawberries and listened to the band, enjoying our picnic and the squeals of little kids high on strawberries and fresh air.

The smell of strawberries on the ride home is so present, their powerful fragrance making its way from the trunk into the car.

We didn’t do anything fancy with them. No tortes or crumbles or cheesecakes. No whipped frosting or shortcakes. No secret recipe – passed down from one to the next – was up my dad’s sleeve for this bounty.

We decided though that what would be best is a good old fashioned strawberry milkshake with fresh strawberries, a splash of vanilla and hand-churned ice cream. Heaven.

I can see us, sitting around the dining table, a milkshake in each of our hands, sipping through paper straws. A lot of mmm noises.

Can you see it too?

The simple elegance of a spring strawberry milkshake.

This is what I do know, what I do remember. Our daughter will too.

Is it different this year? Or am I different?

The birds. They are so…present. Noisy. Alive. Full of movement. And maybe it’s all the more noticeable because for the first time in so long, I’m the still one. Perched in the chair with the south-facing window, watching them flit and zip and communicate with each other. Make proclamations to the world, most of which I’ll never understand, even though I try.

I’m over here! Maybe they are saying. You look nice today! I like it when you fluff up your feathers? Watch out for the red-tailed hawk on the church steeple! The little insects on this kale plant are an incredible appetizer….I like to think these are the things they are sharing with one another, with the neighborhood, their families and friends.

I think it IS different this year. The vibrancy of noticing, gratitude some might call it, breathing and meditating others might think of it.

The din of traffic ever so slightly softer, the airplanes overhead fewer, the footprint of people smaller.

Instead the birds come through, repetitive, clear. The one that sings, alone in the pine tree, at dusk and dawn, she’s the first to arrive in the spring and then she’s off as we turn to summer. Those the chatter back and forth to each other in the camellias, like an old married couple. Or the babies tucked away in their nest amidst the vines who scream to be first in line for dinner.

The white Christian scientific world says that we shouldn’t anthropomorphize animals. That we’re separate and above these creatures. This isn’t how it always was though, and isn’t how it is still in many places, cultures, and times, and isn’t how it has to be. What a loss to not see the shared earthliness, sameness with these sentient beings?

 When I say the words birdsong, you know exactly what I’m talking about, in your mind’s ear.

If you’re still enough to hear it.

He would always point them out on the fence posts, when we were going down the interstate or driving a winding backroad through the country. The red-tailed hawks. Or maybe red-shouldered. Either way, just mottled red, the color of a faded barn. They would be still, statues, against the northern winds. They would be watching for field mice, he’d share. Or voles, whatever those are. Those fence posts lining fallow fields of winter wheat or corn or soybeans. The hawks were best seen in the winter, their long puffed up bodies standing out against the golden and dead corn husks or icy white nothing.

I think about this now, today. My dad teaching me to notice things. To be in the flow, to sit in the process, to understand the context of how the world came to be, the journey ultimately the most important.

When this verdict came out that affirmed what we all knew already. I thought of the last time my dad cried which was the last time he watched the news which was the last time I watched a video of a Black man being slowly killed. Maybe it was a wave of grief that my dad was leaving this world. Maybe it was a wave of grief that this Black man had already left this world, no choice in the matter. Maybe it was a wave of grief that we have so much left to do and he wouldn’t be here to see it done.

My dad was a dove in a hawk’s world, I like to think. He was the one who introduced me to that concept. Talking about Afghanistan likely being another never-ending war, the early Bush era hawks circling to find a paltry excuse for retribution, sending our girls and boys off to places whose names they cannot pronounce and whose poppy fields they would raze without understanding, just following orders in a system designed exactly for that. He talked about Kennedy’s assassination, slightly prone to conspiracies, because he thought Kennedy was a dove and all those around him were hawks, waiting for their chance at power, money, supremacy.

I yearn today for more lessons, scenes, insights from my dad to come back into the front of my mind. I sit idly, looking out the back window at the signs of spring, the signs of a calendar year come and gone, the signs of migration with voices of hummingbirds and yellow finch and chickadee that fill the airshed with life, the signs of things my dad planted and that he touched and that he pruned, the signs of the neighborhood red-tailed hawk circling above as the crows clatter below. Snippets come here and there.

And I wait because I just want more. We all do.

They say one shot in and I’m 80% protected against dying from this virus. That’s so high. That’s miraculous really. That’s a feat of science and decades of investment and research and long nights in neon-lit labs that have culminated so rapidly into this tiny sliver of metal inserting its magic into my arm in a newly-built parklet on Mission street in broad daylight.

That means…I’m not sure what it means.

Are we in the beginning? Or the end? Or perhaps in the middle yet?

For now, I sit in the between with all of you. I heard this week that we’re all languishing, not bad but not well. The not knowing what life will be like, if the anti-vaxxers will ruin it, busting up the party before we really have a chance to get it going again. Stripping away our freedom because they demanded their own freedom from the tyranny of empathy and care and concern for family, neighbors, humanity.

How long will this chance of not dying from this virus last, what boosters and vigilance and performative cleaning and social distancing and staying put will keep resurfacing, like tumbling on the front end waves of a pineapple express storm about ready to pummel the west coast shores?

It ain’t over yet.

I come to, lightly awake in the soft dawn, in between. The thin membrane starting to disintegrate between the sweat on my body and the dream in which I saw my dad, my grandma meeting our daughter. I want to claw my way back up that tunnel, back into the recess of the deepest neural pathways of my mind, to this other place that was quiet and still. Noiseless actually. Forgiving and undemanding.

Not the rush of the world outside my window, construction trucks and Lyft drivers and parents navigating pre-school drop off. The rush that was stilled for many months, now, day by day, picking up, increasing in decibels, birdsong distant again, reopening, even with 55,000 people getting positive COVID tests daily. Up from what was 5000 positive COVID tests daily a year ago. When we all went inside as much as we could, when two weeks seemed like a promise and not a minute. As we swung from one monkey bar to the next, waiting to see if we would all free fall together, the in between.

My eyes are strained, dry, with heavy lids. My neck taught, the tendons around my clavicles wound up like thread on a spool. Jaw clenched in its slight over and cross bite, a feat of human evolution. I know through the night I’ve been clacking and grinding down my back sets of molars. Waking up feeling as though someone slapped me straight into tomorrow, no rest for the weary.

The body I feel, legs heavy, a kind of throbbing, the whoosh of blood pulsing and pushing the muscles further down into the ground, further. The body experiencing gravity and gravity experiencing the body. In sync, in rotation, embodiment. Bone tired is an expression I’d only before heard and now I feel. 

Thoughts float in like bubbles, here, there, I cannot catch them before they are set adrift in the invisible current. I cannot hold them. Track them, like a great hunter in the woods trying to find the thing I seek, the thing I lost, feeling in the dark for the familiar, a tree branch, a rock formation along the trail. The object, if I pull it, might be the end. end of what, I don’t know. The pandemic, a memory, a relationship, self-reliance, being awakened, the moment after waking up before I realize I’m awake and the world is treacherous and we will all die.

Three weeks ago it began. Missing a word, forgetting a place, working too long to conjure up a name. no one else has noticed it, or so they say.

But I notice it.

Is this what it feels like, the slow burn of aging, the fast flame of life, of dementia, of metastasis to the brain, of all these years without hormones speeding up cellular deterioration and calcification of neural superhighways. No longer being the friend who is identified as the elephant because she never forgets. Being that person, a body, then a shell, later a carcass, alone in the darkness, waiting.

This virus is something that exists right now. Has always existed really, in a bird, a feathered or scaled creature. Replicating, evolving, coming up with ever-more-creative ways to simply exist. It has seen many sunrises and sunsets, ocean basins and continents away from where I’m huddled now, sheltering in place, the no-longer-novel turn of phrase to describe the privilege many of us have with shelter.

Without the close interaction of wildlife – animals still free to be – and domesticated humans, the stark line of forest and razed earth, the brushing up of pine needles to our legs – without these things, the virus would not have taken on a bigger life, taken over all of our lives. It wouldn’t be here in my town, my neighborhood, my city block without the air and currents, the jet stream, airplanes, a globalized world, the riotous mixing and merging and showcasing of cultures. Things that I love. Things that I breathe in, dream about, look forward to experiencing. The cacophony of people and places on this earth. Because of all of that, the virus is.

What’s the saying? Every vice is a virtue. Every virtue is a vice. Too much of a good thing.

In our own grief circle today over lunch, I sat with three colleagues, friends actually. Luck of the draw in a zoom break-out room. All of us wishing we could reach through the screen and hug, rest a hand on each other’s shoulders, provide comfort with our skin.

We are a year into this life – there is a before and an after and yet we are between. We were being still and holding stillness together, remembering. Recognizing that we are unequipped to handle it, we block out the worst of it. Asking about how we best show up for the many colleagues whose parents died, alone, in hospital rooms far away. The helplessness, deserted on an island of grief, millions of us.

We marvel at how the pandemic was the through line – compounded by systemic racism and healthcare access disparities, multiplied by the dangling thread of a yet-new democracy and by climate-scourged wildfires and floods and power outrages, and exponential-ized by attempted kidnappings and Capitol sieges. Asking questions about how the perception of resilience in ourselves and our friends masks the ugly truth. What resilience will be left and what will be forever chipped away, a crumbling foundation upon which makes it damn impossible to rebuild.

Wondering what spaces we can co-create in some uncertain future that are those of healing, wholeness, collective grief, spaces where our private griefs can be tossed into a fire, like heavy rocks, hot enough to burn but never disintegrating into ash. Just charring, morphing over long time patterns from the heat, wind, and waves that outlive us. Just like this virus will.