A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

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October 3, 2014

Coming Home

It’s been almost three years since my father died. The passage of time is terrifying. It blinds. It mutes. It forgets. Yet every time I fly home from wherever I’ve been, I pass the space, the rows of chairs to the right of security check, where he always sat, waiting for his daughter to return from college, then from New York, then from God-knows-where, I travelled so much to run away from things.

My husband waits in the pick-up lane, car turned on, sometimes he’s smoking a cigarette by the curb. It’s actually faster that way — pick up and go. But Dad always parked and waited inside the airport, right where the limousine men stand with their dry-erase signs, right where I could see his face light up when he saw me. He was always early to things, maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour. He always went the extra mile.

Every time I fly home, I pretend he’s still there. Using my powers of imagination, I see him for a brief second. Sometimes I chose what age he is, younger with his wild mass of black hair or the years right before the cancer, a bit too thin, the warning sign we all missed, silver hair, receding but still wild. The image is fleeting. It breaks my heart a little each time. But still, I say, “Hello Dad, I’ve missed you, it’s good to be home,” and he responds, “Salut, ma cherie” and kisses me on the cheek.

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April 11, 2014

Lucky Stones

As a young adult, I wore a boxy Liz claiborne purse, gray or light tan with a thin leather cross-over strap, filled with pencils, erasers, flavored lipgloss and a few lucky rocks. I had collected a gray skipping tone, the size of a big grape, and a smooth hematite. I was shy and when I felt challenged, my fingers would turn over the stones in my bag, infusing me with providence and power.I was an animist; my stones had souls. I cannot quite remember when I grew out of them but it was not an obvious transition. In high school, I shoplifted crystals from nature stores at the mall. In college, I collected frogs.

Finally I abandoned the needs of childhood to ground myself with physical objects and instead retreated to the colorful recesses of my mind, where fantasies trumped the day. For years now, I have hedged on reality. Even when two beautiful children have presented me with magic beyond human imagination, I have maintained my own dream life, a foot-out-the-door of this world, a vague morass of happiness and drama where no decisions need ever be made, just possibilities, endless possibilities.

I have my own versions of lucky rocks, ideas that help me get through it all: moving to Los Angeles or even better, Bali, irrational crushes, careers I could never pursue, hobbies that remain out of reach and things I have no intention of acquiring. At my wedding, I felt terrorized by my own uncertainty not so much because I lacked in love but more because I lacked the ability to live within the compass of regularity. Happiness was something for people that understood what this game of life was about, I reasoned.

Yet as I pursue mindfulness,I must let go of the notion that something outside of myself, be it a rock or a distant dream, fulfills me. And for a dreamer like me, this is bittersweet.

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