The Sun that is Young Once Only

                                                    The Sun that is Young Once Only

                            Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

                                 Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

                                                      In the moon that is always rising,

                                                             Nor that riding to sleep

                                                  I should hear him fly with the high fields

                                   And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

                                     Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

                                                       Time held me green and dying

                                                 Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

                                 Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, from his great work, Fern Hill

                                The last three lines are on his tombstone. He died aged 39.

Am here in my flat in Dhahran and for the first time since I have arrived here, three months since, I feel lonely and I feel sad. I have fallen under this overwhelmingly sad weight of the loss of my ability to spend time with my children and their childhood and my connection with them and the lousy choices that I made to give my time and energy to the woman who entered my life and whom I focused my attentive energies on instead.

The memory of my boy, of my little Paolino, sobbing, dying slowly from my change in fathering. The damage that I caused that immaculate child. That precious, precious boy. And the terrible things that I did to mask that damage within myself.How I pushed it all down with drink and sex and with self talk that just never made any sense to justify my actions. Time that will not be ever rolled back. Now here I am some eleven thousand miles away doing my adventure, my work camp, wishing that those choices that I made were different, regretting that whole decade of ducking life and my familial duties.

 

Twice now in two days I find myself crying over lost filial relations. Today it is my feelings of removal from my father. Not because of wrongdoing on anyone’s part, but rather simply because of the way in which life operates, how we move on. Here so far from my father and from my sons, I feel cast out, Lucifer from Heaven, why have you forsaken me sort of thing. Yet it is to whom that I direct this? To myself. In the end it is only to me that I can direct these feelings of being alienated from my own family, from the dreams and the splendor and the infinite reaches of space and time that my childhood spanned during those summer months spent playing, spent talking and laughing with my father and my family. Where did they all go? Did they go anywhere at all? Is time really not a progressive, linear dimension but one that just already is and never changes? Is it that it is only our perception of it moving forward that keeps us from remaining stuck in one emotional place? Yet it moves on, apparently, and I find myself repeatedly fixed in certain places nonetheless.

It must be some combination of things that places me in this fragile place right now. In under three weeks I will return to my hometown, will be greeted by my two children, will see my family members shortly thereafter. So why is it now, after three months of self exile here in this far different and geographically far distant place that I now have emotional moments with regards to this topic? Is it because I had placed a splint of kinds over the delicate places to keep them strong whilst this transition occurred? Is it that now that I can exhale properly again and let, as they say, my guard down, that I feel deflated, a bit defeated?

Is it because I am editing my father’s book again and that brings me into intimate contact repeatedly and often with his thoughts and his work? Parts of the book center on his early life, his life before, at the age of thirty, he came to the States. It is like a double helix strand of DNA, the images and tales, how they swirl about one another and come inexorably down through time and across space to settle into and through me, interlocking with my own experiences and understandings of self, splicing together words, yellowed photographs, Christmas mornings, and on into the mélange of experiences and thoughts of my own children. Spooled together into one unbroken lineage of humanness, of intimacy, or patrilineal continuity. Cell division uncontrolled, spilling over from physical body to new physical body, and mind and thought as well, like a culture overspilling its dish, moves from him to me to them and undoubtedly, at some point in the future, into their’s and theirs’ after that. A long line of being and of becoming and of shared spirit, body, and mind. Is it then one memory modified by different experiences that we all represent, or is it indeed separate memories that work in close harmony one with the other, a symphony of interlocking notes forming a larger score, a body of beings linked closely through blood and through proximity.

The manner of one’s perspective on time and how that changes over time is truly remarkable. It is a phenomenon known to everyone over a certain age. I’m not sure what that age is, and I suppose it is different for each of us, but we all come to understand it. As a child, one summer is akin to a small lifetime, and looking back on our halcyon days we feel it well, the sepia tinted, slow motion home video film footage in our minds of smiling children at family celebrations, sitting on our father’s shoulders, crying over a skinned knee.  Compared to today, as a middle aged adult, when a summer is just barely three monthly bill paying sessions, enough time to maybe read a few books and take a small trip. How did Einstein lay out his special theory of relativity? A second spent sitting on a hot stove feels like a minute and a minute spent talking to a pretty girl feels like a second.  

The time today is time that I am working to make go slower. The fruits on my tree of life are ripe and pulling the boughs earthward with their weight and number. I have two ineffably remarkable children whom I want to be able to spend time with, to explore, to befriend as adults, now out of the role of provider of rules, wisdom, authority. Sure I still hope to impart some of these to them, but not to any extent that endangers my access to time spent with them sharing consciousness, sharing this special form of continued bloodline consciousness that transcends one person, one mind, that carries down through the long and geologic expanse of genetic time memory presence.

When I was visiting my step-father, Garry, at his Ann Arbor apartment back in 1984, I remember that I was reading Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I shall never forget that visit, that apartment, nor that book and the theme that it revolved around. I was nineteen years old, had ridden a greyhound bus from New Orleans up to visit him, was spending the better part of a week there. I had been reading this magnificent book, written in 1940 but absolutely timeless, and marinading myself in the theme, also timeless, I mean literally; the theme of this book being just that, about a time without time. It is about an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who has expertise in demolitions and who is tasked with setting charges to blow up a bridge before soldiers supporting Spain’s dictatorial ruler, Francisco Franco, arrive. Robert Jordan, the man, is fully aware that he will in all likelihood not survive the bridge blowing mission and he is set on living an entire life in the last three days that he has been given. This work of Hemingway's does a fantastic job of examining this profound theme.

Jordan convinces himself that he can stretch the minutes out, experience them, really live them, examine them, take them apart, slow them down. In the last seventy two hours of his life he falls In love with a young Spanish woman, makes new friends, relives old memories, plans his mission, carries it out.  The bell most certainly tolls for Jordan, as it does for each of us, as Donne penned so accurately and so elegantly. “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. No man is island, entire of itself.” And so it is for Jordan, he is not alone. He is intertwined, connected, his mind and spirit an integral, important part of those of the people around him.

Hemingway wrote this book at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, the small community adjacent to the nation’s first ski resort, Sun Valley, publishing it in 1940. I will be spending some few nights there in about five weeks, walking the very roads where, long in years, his mental health deteriorated significantly due to long years of drink and to his ideations of a loss of his virility and masculinity due to age, Hemingway walked, mumbling to himself, unkempt and disheveled. It was in ketchup also, using the same double barreled shotgun that his father used for the same purpose a half a continent away and some decades earlier, that he shot himself in the head, ending his life in the latter part of the 1960s. Perhaps in those last months of his waning health as he waked up and down the Ketchum streets up and into the trails of the surrounding hills, Papa Hemingway believed that indeed he was an island and not “a part of the main,” as the poem contends.

If Jordan can do this, elongate his perception of time, live a life in three days, can I make the remaining decades of my life last and  last? Can I live many lives in this remaining "time"? One of the facts that is known about the elusive and ephemeral phenomenon that we call time is that it is a perception and that it is part of what we think of as space, hence the concept of spacetime. Thus energy equals matter times the speed of light squared. Matter is time and vice versa. So I think I’ll just do my best to keep this equation in the front of my mind, to make my time last like a Jolly Rancher candy, range over and in as much spacetime as I can, and suck the sweetness from it slowly. Try to make that minute spent talking to a pretty girl feel like a minute, or like ten.

How else will the shorter units of “time” that I shall now be allowed to share with my boys in any manner satiate me? Will I then try to speed up the time that I spend away from them, the time, for example, that I spend in Saudi Arabia working? Make that second spent on a hot stove feel like a second? No. No I will not. I shan’t detract from the one to give to the other. I shall endeavor instead to make my days a string of Jolly Ranchers, sour apple one day, grape the next. I will intoxicate myself on the warm, scented breezes of each sunset and use those rare and precious seconds and minutes to reflect and to savor and to live. I will suck the sweetness, not out of life, but out of each of life’s innumerable moments. I will account for each one and I will endeavor to make them extraordinary.

I have less than three weeks to go before I fly back to the states. I am not in a hurry. Life is good here and it is going to be good there. My summer plans include relaxing, drinking beer, adding a bathroom onto the tiny house that I live in, and taking a one month road trip with my two boys and my 1982 VW Westphalia Camper, Cherie, to the Midwest to visit my mother, my step-father, and my brother, his wife, and their small girl. Milwaukee, Chicago, and the vast and open, largely empty, western plain states. Oregon. Idaho. Montana. Wyoming. South Dakota. Minnesota. Wisconsin. Illinois.  Camping, brew pubs, dinners spent laughing and communing, campfires, the warm, bathwater rising up above the hairs on the back of my neck connection with those beings whom I adore.

I guess my goal then this summer is to spend a month traveling with my two favorite beige and to make it last and last. To awaken each morning with an eye towards wonder and interest in each and every moment, to relish each conversation and opportunity, to explore the portions of the universe that I am present in, to inspect the grass, the landscape before me, the people whom I am fortunate enough to befriend, and to look forward to each new vista and each new sound as though it is a many course meal served in the finest of restaurants. What sumptuous dish will next be served? No, there's no hurry. Thank you. Tell the chef to take his time. I'll be right here savoring mine.