Ordinary Blessings

for Annie,

on the 8th Anniversary of our first meeting

We arrive at the sink

                at the same moment

you

        from the workshop

I

       from the garden

scrubbing the grit from our fingertips

                smiling in each other’s eyes.                          

We agree on sudden changes

                in our plan for the yard

arriving at the same conclusion

                at the same moment

                         with almost no discussion.

We agree on changes

      in our plan for the yard

arriving at the same conclusion

after fierce disagreement

                and finally                          

                              laughter.

We sip coffee and tea on the deck

                feeling the cool morning breeze

                                together.

We sip wine on the deck

                feeling the cool evening breeze

                                together.

We laugh at the machinations of the many

                quail families

                                chittering

                as their babies peck at the dirt

                beneath mom and dad’s guardian eyes.

We mourn over a crow’s destruction

                of a wren nest in the pergola.

We begin and end the day with kisses

still lavish them

              alone in elevators

                         or on the street

                             or in a restaurant.

We get out the door together

                 on time

                      or early

                                every

                                      single

                                            time.

We savor food, books, our bodies,

                    yes our bodies

              their capacity for pleasure

              their capacity as instruments of spiritual fire-making

              their capacity to affirm

                              with a mere touch

                                that we are something

                                          real in a world that often isn’t.     

We savor imaginings, memories, wonderings

       …would we have met if this had happened, or that…

and celebrate

                that they didn’t

                                 and we did.

We rub each other’s shoulders and feet

                   hold hands everywhere

admire and cherish

                   each other’s spirit

                                 and intelligence,

engage in outrageous silliness

                     which if revealed to the public

would tank our reputations as serious people.

We actually listen to hear

           and speak to be heard

                   most of the time.

We manage to hold each other

                                tenderly

                                   knowingly

                     at some point

                            every single day

in spite of, and sometimes because of,

                     long-lived childhood despairs.                      

In the movie theater’s darkness

      we clutch each other’s hands

                               and weep

over lost loved ones

                               war

                          inexplicable acts of courage

                                  unrecognized genius

               the all too human

                               inhumanity of man.

When we get a splinter

bang an elbow

           stub a toe

                     bump a head

when we feel the ache of muscles,

            the wearing of joints

               --pain in the hands

                               feet

                              lumbar

                         elbows

                           shoulders

                   ankles,

when we contemplate together

           the long look back

                 and the ever-shortening

                      forward,

when we witness demon diseases

         drawing down the shades

                                in the cells

                              of family and friends

…then we know

               the usual search for miracles

                                 is misguided

because each moment

  no matter how

                         ordinary

                 mundane

                             routine

                       predictable            

               freighted with feelings

                     falling far short of joy

is miraculous

          is life

                 living itself

           standing strong and bending before its own wind

                 illuminated and blinded by its own light

                       instructed and frightened by its own darkness

                            mesmerized by its own music                           

                                --the sound of tears joining rain

                                 laughter

                                        thunder--

every nuanced moment

               --even the uncounted

                      unnoticed

                              certainly uncelebrated ones

               --and every ordinary breath

                                 a blessing.

C Bob Kamm 2015

July 16.

Pure Dialogue

for Annie

From

     the deepest place within me

                                 I am listening

                      I am listening

                                     to you…

                              from the place of firsts

                                        first sensations

                                            feelings

                                                 images

                                                       voices

             the place before words

                and the place where first words emerged

                                 from cooing and soft gazes                                    

                              when their meanings were wet

                                                            and clear

                            as the eyes of a child

                                 witnessing his first rain.

I am listening from

this place

                   of first encounters

                          the way small children do

                                         sitting on a curb

                                  close enough to hear each other’s breathing

                                             every little sound of lip and tongue

                                  close enough to lift an eyelash from a cheek.       

              

Listening and looking

from this place

                              I hear you

 I see you

            as you

              and only you

           discovering you

               as you discover yourself

       both

                the little girl

        raising a bouquet of lavender

                  to her father’s troubling gaze

                                 and the woman

                              who asks that I be a better person

                                         and face her

        with soft eyes.

In this place

              I feel your truth

                         in a way that is self-affirming

                                       free of judgment

                                                   or interpretation

                                and calls me to give you

                                                            all that is within my reach

                                     and much that is just beyond it.

I thought I was a winged being

                    but find I am just now

                                                   shimmying from my chrysalis.

                           

From the deepest place within me

                           I am speaking

                              I am speaking

                                      to you

             from the place of my first awakenings

                        to the love and hurt

                             my mother carried

                                    from her own first place

                             my father from his

                             my older brothers

                                          grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins,

                            my neighbors, classmates, coaches and teachers

                                              the town’s shop owners and policemen

                                                   everyone, it seemed,

                              each and all carrying

                                             their gifts and unassuaged needs       

   into their lives

                                           and mine

                            gifts and cracked pieces of themselves

                 that became the stones of my path

    the giant trees

                  slopes and cliffs

                       I climbed

                                 the rivers

                   glens and woods

         I crossed

to arrive here

     in this moment

in the glades

of your eyes.

From this place,

               my love,

  my words, pace, tones and gestures

               will be

                     to the best of my striving

            Love’s choices

                    so you can readily receive

                     what I share

discover me

               as I discover myself

and both of us affirm

that while you may

     unwittingly

                   rub against

              an abiding loss or injury

                              from those early days

                 you are free from blame.

                       The transgression happened long ago

and though it still lives in me

                  and often resists revelation

                             you

                                were

                                    not

                                 even

           there.

You were in your own first place

                         trying to hold on to

                                  your own truth.

                                                          

Speaking from my first place

               revealing the small boy

                         placing a spray

                                of forget-me-nots

                                   at the feet of his busy mother                                                            

              I can reveal what is real for the man

                             in a clean request

                        you can answer

                               or decline

                                     for you are as free to say no

                              as yes.

Now

    we meet

                 face to face

each of us arriving from

a place of firsts

   into this new one

                                       we create

                                         together

                        with willingness and wonder

                                  tenderness

                                       reflection and remembrance

each bringing offerings of

                              words

                                   waiting

                                          listening

                                                 silence

       this place

             where mingled tears

                              remake us

             to glisten

                            in the morning sun

      this place

             where we name each other

               as if whispering

                    Eden's first words

this place

                  where wild compassion

blooms

   from consciousness

         and from compassion

                                  connection.

 Bob Kamm 12/14

A Poem of Thanksgiving

Inspired by elder Gerry Oleman

of the Coast Salish People of British Columbia

during his welcoming remarks at the 9^th Annual Imago Conference in Vancouver, BC, 2012

Long before us

 skies

    sun and moon

     oceans

         deserts

forests

                              meadows

                                 mountains.                                                          

Long before us

eagle

       and all that lived beneath her.

Long before us

               rain tapping on the beetle’s back.

Long before us

reflections in pools of quiet creeks

flowing and frozen,

   reflections of overhanging trees,

the movement of light on berries,

the faces of buck, doe and fawn,

               raccoon, wolf, cougar,

                      ovenbird rocking on twig,

the tightening of night’s grasp

       on trunks and rocks.

But no images

               of  human face

                       not one

not in puddle or pond

          not in the hand mirrors of ice-clad leaves,

               not even in the eye of predator or prey.

Long before us

      beings of all kinds

            writing their exquisite

and desperate

      life stories

on pages of earth, air, water, bark and stone,

leaving behind few traces

-- faint echoes broken by wind.

Not for us the great awakening of life

but each life for itself

and the shimmering whole

and the joy and sadness

of The Mother and Father of All Things.

The Mother and Father of All Things

who through their

restless risky dance

     made the universe

                          from a solitary seed

-the seed of all seeds

all beings

all things.

We are here now.

And though we strut about

proud parrots,

we are small,

         late-comers to the festival.

We still don’t know the dances.

If we are honest

we must wonder

if The Mother and Father of All Things

for a single moment

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity

imagined

we would become so discontent

with the abundant gardens They provided,

would set out

to live

not just outside them

                              but

       everywhere

with such fiery intention

our success was assured.

Did Mother and Father,

having birthed all things

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity         

from the seed of all seeds,

pause

     even for a moment

to imagine

that one day

their favored principle

of hunter and hunted

would run amok in us,

that we would

discard and devour

               so much of the earth

and hound so many species

as well as our own mothers, fathers

               brothers, sisters

               sons and daughters

into a Great Vanishing?

With such history behind and within us,

how is it that Mother and Father

still let us live

let us struggle to find our way

               toward redemption?

Are They simply indulgent weavers who cannot discard

a deeply flawed blanket

whose dark designs they have come to love?

Or are They truly possessed

of  a compassion beyond our comprehension?

At this moment

life is ours.

Let us set our feet on the path

with prayers

of thanksgiving.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to Mother and Father.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to all They put here before us

that led to now,

“Thank you!” to all that is,

“Thank you!” to all that will be.

For fourteen billion years

we

    were

not

                                     yet.

Mother and Father birthed the universe

without a hand from us,

worked out its drama

through cold and hot fury,

barrenness, solitude, roar and silence,

then

gave us

     the chance to wriggle

from long-ripening wombs.

Why us? 

Why was each of us born and not others?

Why did we make adulthood and not others?

How can we show our gratitude and worthiness

for such a chancy investment?

Let us offer still more thanks.

Let us give thanks

to The Mother and Father of All Things

 for having

the wild, foolish, restless impulse to choose

us

and not brother sperm

               or sister ova.

Let us thank the earth They made

which has given rise to all we draw upon

               for sustenance and succor

--to the waters we use

to grow and cook,

slake our thirst,

 clean our bodies,

          frolic and fish;

 to the soil that gives rise to plants

that give us sweet air to breathe,

 plants we eat,

 plants we use to weave, build, warm,

trap, hunt, play  and heal;

Let us give thanks

to all the beings

         from the tiniest we cannot see

to the largest

whose flesh, bones, sinews and skins

we have taken

with ecstasy and sadness

for we know they were not made for us

but for themselves,

for the shimmering whole

 and for Mother and Father

in their incomprehensible creative fervor.

Let us give thanks to the long bead chain of grandmothers

who

carried and birthed other grandmothers until

our own mothers ripened and carried us

and helped us wriggle into the wild,

beautiful,

sad and terrifying

world.

To all who were present at the moment of our births

we give thanks,

the family and tribe that cared for us

in our helplessness

when we were pure

and yet

 knew nothing

and all those who caressed and patted us

               along our way to discover

               how to become human beings

how to live and love

with elegance and awkwardness

                              brilliance and ignorance

               how to sing, dance, drum, whoop, laugh,

          whisper and weep

                              together,

how to hold each other with bold affection

               and yet step back so each of us can

                              hear

                              the song of his own being.

May we raise our children

               with such right love

                   --devotion without indulgence--

               that before long

               across the many lands

               each soul is a gathering place

                              where all souls are safe.

Then may our ways

                           be fragrant as spring soil

and tasty as ripe berry juice

                                                            to Mother and Father

so They might find us worthy

     of their work and worry,

give us

lives

   that are

good

               and long

and end

     with our cheeks

 on Their chests

as we listen to Their hearts

drum

  drum

      drum

before setting out

               for the gardens

in the bright reaches

of their eyes.

C Copyright 2012 Bob Kamm, reproduction by author’s permission only.

My Brother Lew Has Cancer

for Lew

My brother Lew has cancer. 

He is diagnosed early in 2011 at sixty-six.   He  has just spent a few weeks on the beach in Florida to get away from the New England winter.  Wonderful trip.  Then, suddenly, after returning to Rhode Island his left leg begins to swell.  What could it be?  A spider bite?  Some weird allergic reaction?  An infection?  A series of doctor visits and scans, from the local hospital to Massachusetts General and then the diagnosis.  Metastatic carcinoma of unknown origin.  It has probably been growing undetected for a year.  They don’t know where it started in his body.  Along with the multisyllabic diagnoses come multisyllabic drugs of, well, to us, unknown origin—xeloda , cisplatin, carboplatin, gemcitabine, taxol, pemetrexed, vinorelbine.  The names do not roll off the tongue.  They represent a new language to be mastered.  For all their strangeness, they might as well be the names of half-human, half-insect kings from the other side of the universe.   I feel as though I have razor blades in my mouth every time I try to say one of them.  There is, early on, also the possibility of multiple surgeries with “ectomy” at the end of each one…meaning cut it out.  Remove this.  Remove that.  Ironically, when a scan reveals microscopic signs of cancer in other areas of the body, the surgeries are ruled out.  They won’t give him the supposed quality of life they are intended to give. 

My brother Lew has cancer. 

He is twenty-seven months older than I am.  We have always said it that way in our family, from the time we are kids.  Not “roughly two years older”.  Not “two years and three months older.”  Twenty-seven months.  There is a certain love of precision in our blood, when it comes to some things.  Now that precision has brought us perilously close in a way we never imagined.  Twenty-seven months apart.  One of us has cancer.  The other doesn’t.  But now I am sixty-six.  Could I be next?  Only a pathological optimist would fail to wonder.

                                                  ***

I’m seven years old.  My father is a writer.  I am going to be a writer.  My first undertaking is a novel called “Little Lewie”.  My older brother Lew is the hero.  He is twenty-seven months older than I am.  Actually, he is twenty-six months and three weeks older.  I have just figured this out, at seven.  Precision is important. But I’ve learned you can round up and still be considered precise.  Lew is my hero in my first book because he is my older brother and I love him.  Even though we are close in age.  Even though there is some strange energy between us sometimes.  I later learn it is called “sibling rivalry.”  I do not have this with Larry, who is seven years older.  He is an island apart.  His thoughts and feelings are beyond us.  Seven years is forever, especially when you’re seven.   But whatever that energy is that I will later learn to call rivalry, there is something else far more powerful.  I love my brother.  I think he is really, really neat. My parents love him, too.  They think he is really neat.  I love how they love him.

I type my story on my father’s yellow copy paper, commonly used at newspapers these days, something that will vanish in about five decades as computers take over.  But right now, this yellow paper is my parchment, my holy scroll.  I type only short paragraphs.  I have to push hard, one finger at a time, on the keys of my father’s massive Royal typewriter.  Then I draw pictures on each page.  It’s a basketball story.  Heroism on the court.  Little Lewie is, well, little, but he can really move and shoot. I start with stick figures, then draw the flesh around them and erase the stick lines or shade over them, stretched out on my stomach in the grass under the dogwood tree.

                                                ***

My brother Lew has cancer. 

It’s now two years downstream from the moment of diagnosis.  The moment when a doctor says, “You have cancer.”  The moment when only you can know what it feels like to be the “you” in that sentence. Lew is beating the survival odds.  He is in the one tenth of one percent category.  But he still has cancer.  There has been no surgery, other than an arduous initial one to get a biopsy.  So he has all his organs.  He is a whole person, but his body is gradually experiencing the insurrection of rebel cells.  First radiation and then chemo have become part of the daily experience.  This is my second visit from across the country.  The first was this time a year ago.  His left leg was swollen to about two and a-half times the normal size. The initial tumor is in his left hip, inoperably surrounding the femoral artery.  Still, during the first visit he is in what our father often referred to as “fine fettle,” all things considered.  (That phrase, “all things considered” has taken on a whole different meaning. )  He wears a compression stocking which is hard to get on and off.  The swelling is due to what is called lymphedema.  Still, he is able to drive and insists on taking me all around the area where he has lived for nearly forty years…and which I have never visited in all that time.  He takes me to the campus at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth where he won eight national awards for being one terrific French professor and  from which he has just recently retired.  The campus is an impressive collection of massive concrete rectangles and open walkways.  I can imagine him in a lecture hall.  I can imagine him being stopped by a student with a question as he makes his way from one building to another.  I can imagine the respect, even adoration in his eyes.  I don’t have to see him lecture to know he is capable of spellbinding lectures of the richest kind.  He takes me all around the Rhode Island-Massachusetts boundary zone.  We drive across big metal bridges and onto low rocky beaches.  He shares memory upon memory, forty years of life I have missed being in California.  He takes me to the whaling museum and the church across the street where whalers worshipped before going out into the big sea after behemoths, the church Melville mentions in Moby Dick.  He takes me to a number of his favorite lunch places including the Inn at Castle Hill, a grand old building sitting on a hill above a bay.  It looks like something out of The Great Gatsby.  A broad lawn runs from the Inn down to the water.  There are lines of bright, empty white Adirondack chairs.  It’s still spring.  The wind has a chill.  No one will sit in them for a while.

My brother Lew has cancer.

I keep saying it, thinking that maybe it will fully sink in if I do.  Because it hasn’t.  It feels as if we are in an alternate universe.  If we just find a window we can wriggle through, we can get back to the one where he is enjoying his retirement, cancer free.  We lost dad in 02 at eighty-five.  We lost Larry in 04 at sixty-four.  For the first time in our lives, we are both older than our oldest brother.  We lost Mom later in 04.  Now it’s Lew and me and we are dealing with this demon again.  I’m looking for that window.  If we can only wriggle through…

The second visit.  This morning Lew is seated in the large reclining chemo chair at St. Anne’s Oncology Hospital in Fall River, just over the line in Massachusetts.  For two years, there has been nothing in his lungs but small dots.  Now, suddenly, a golf ball-sized mass in the lower left lung.  How does this happen in only a short time between scans?  The demon. Lew is holding his shirt above  his chest as he did when he was a kid to show our mother his chicken pox. This time, it is so the nurse can slip a needle that looks like a kitten’s claw into the port that has been installed just below the skin above his right pectoral muscle.  I ask if it hurts.  He says, “Yes, but just temporarily—a pin prick.”   The nurse adds, “We are penetrating just a little skin.” 

Fifteen minutes earlier, we are with his oncologist, Nancy, a woman in her late thirties, who talks to him as if he might be an old boyfriend from high school.  She is sweet, but she is also very direct and thorough.  Lew has a lot of questions.  He knows he is at the stage where the hope for any kind of enduring remission is a slim-to-none possibility.  He wants to know what the end is like.  When he can’t handle the pain any more, or when it’s too much labor to breathe, will they put him on a drip?  No, the doctor tells him, we rarely use drips any more.  The necessary pain meds are delivered orally in pill form, slipped under the tongue. He’s surprised but I tell him Mom was given morphine pills, under the tongue.  The doctor confirms.  Under the tongue.  The same tongue he stuck out at me when we were kids to make brilliantly outrageous faces.  The same tongue he stuck out for the doctor who examined him for tonsillitis.  The same tongue that helped him articulate millions of words as he lectured and coached university students for thirty six years.  The same tongue that he no doubt shared in the ecstatic clutch of love with his wife of forty years.   Now, the tongue that will be the mail box for pain suppression until there are no more funny faces possible, no more words, no more love.

                                                ***

A lot of us say we want to live to be a hundred…or more.  We don’t think about the potential dark side of that wish.  My mother lived to bury her first born child when he was only sixty-four.  Had my father not died two years earlier, he’d have been broken by Larry’s death.  Were he alive today, he’d be ninety-five.  If he knew his second son was unlikely to make it out of his sixties, he’d have gone from broken to pulverized.  My mother would have been crushed beside him.  People say they want the power to see the future.  They could get rich betting on the Kentucky Derby and Superbowl, knowing the outcomes. And they could get paralyzed foreseeing the coming calamities.  We all signed the lease of life without the term being filled in.  It’s an act of faith.  Without the ignorance of what is in store for us, it isn’t living.

                                               ***

Lew looks at the doctor straight on as she tells him that the recent onset of fatigue is the cancer, not the fentanyl patch, not the dilaudid, not the high doses of ibuprofen.  That’s why we’re trying this new chemo, docetaxel, to get you some energy back.  To give you some good days. 

He tells her, he has shared with me that he doesn’t expect to see his 69^th birthday seven months away.  She looks right at him.  We know where this is going, she says.  She doesn’t confirm the timeline, but the direction and the gist.  I am struck by how present she is, how honest, how empathetic without being unctuous.  This is her everyday life, I guess.  She is here to help people live a little longer and then leave comfortably.  Lew seems grateful for her honesty.  He is beyond struggling.  He doesn’t hit her with twenty “what if’s”. 

I ask Lew if he is afraid.  No.  I ask him if he is angry.  No.  He has told me in detail about his belief in reincarnation.  He is sure he has been here before and will be again.  He sees no tragedy, just some disappointment.  “I thought I had more time.  I ask if he feels sadness at times.  Yes.  Sadness.  For Anne, for his grandson, Ben, whom he has raised as his son for his two sons, Tommy and Jeffrey and their partners, Jackie and Tina.  He knows they are bound to him.  They’ll “be okay” whatever that means.  In that okayness, they will miss him terribly.  They will hurt for a long time.  But Lew has accepted he doesn’t have long.  His stoicism comes straight from our mother.  Certainly not Dad.  Though he was calm and accepting when his time came, Dad was eighty-five.  Had this happened to him at such a young age, he’d have been mightily angry, and mightily depressed.  I am more like him but Lew’s calm reaches me.  Besides, we are both old enough to stop asking why bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad.  As one of the mantra’s of our age says:  It is what it is.  But Lew does have a new mantra, a surprising one.  Several times a day he sighs from fatigue and/or pain, quietly uttering the old Yiddish expression, “Oy vey”.  It means, “Oh, where?” as in “Oh, where am I?”  Funny that a people should develop that habit of asking, “Where am I?” when they are hurting.  Ironic, since we have never been very religious or even ethnic.  I doubt Lew has been in a synagogue in decades.  Still, the words we heard from our grandparents and on occasion, our father, seem to say it best right now.  “Where am I?”  Am I still here where I get to be the person I have always been?  Or am I now somehow in a different place, in an alternate universe where weird multisyllabic kings dictate who I am and what I can do? 

                                               ***

The docetaxel is dripping into him.  He is in no pain.  He rests with his eyes closed, turned on his right hip.  A new nurse shows up, crouches down in his direct line of sight, touches him gently.  He opens his eyes.  “Jan!”  They hug and hold each other as dearly as lifelong friends.  “I’ve missed you!” he says.  She returns the feeling.  She was his first oncology nurse.  They got close.  She got transferred to another unit.  She heard he was asking for her.

The hugs, the deep direct gazes.  These people are either brilliantly trained or just brilliantly attuned (or both).  Why don’t we all look at each other this way every day?  Why do we wait for cancer to make gazing a true communion?

At least four different nurses interact with Lew and at some point, each one of them does a double take when they look at me.  Then, it’s either the straightforward, “You must be Lew’s brother!” or the teasing, “You can’t be Lew’s brother!”  Do we really look that alike?  Of course, we are family.  We have the same skin tone, high foreheads, the barest thatch left on top, similar hands…but aren’t our noses, even though they’re both prominent, actually quite different?  Our mouths?  The overall configuration of our heads?  Have we missed something, something that is both physical and sacred that is obvious to others…something that is the essence of what it means to be brothers?

                                                ***

During my visit, I have a series of dreams:  I am in a strange landscape…vertiginous cliffs, massive tsunamis, buses swept away filled with children, entire cruise boats disappearing into the valleys of wave mountains.  I do not recognize any place or any one.  I keep asking, “Where am I?”  “What is this place?”  “How will I ever get home?”  I wake up, heart pounding…not racing, probably not above 65, but pounding all the way to my ankles.  Maybe high blood pressure is generally a silent killer, but at this moment, it is loud and clear.  In another dream, I am told by a grizzled old man that I must follow the rules.  I object.  “I have been self-employed a long time.  I don’t follow your rules.  I follow mine!”  He points to pictures of my parents, Larry, Lew.  I wake up, again, heart slamming into my chest.

                                                ***

I’m at Tom’s Market in Tiverton, RI.  I have a list from both Lew and Anne.  I’m only here for three days but this is one thing I can do.  I can take a few tasks off Anne’s plate.  I can ask someone where the summer sausage is, where the prunes are, whether or not they have some of Lew’s favorites.  I can also walk the dog, Magnet, a 52 pound muscular chunk of Australian herder.  He has spent hours laying on the bed next to Lew, sleeping, but he is young and born to run.  I can also show Anne how to use the Jack LaLanne Juicer.  She’s not a tech person.  We put the juicer together and throw in some carrots, cumber, celery, apple. 

                                               ***

Lew has no quandary over the meaning of life.  His time has been beautiful and rich.  You have touched so many, I say.  Think of all those students who love you.  Think of the teachers who moved you.  Teachers never know the expanses of time and terrain their teachings will cross…but they travel.  Your teachings have wings.  People a half a world away at this moment might be talking about their time in one of your classes.  He smiles at the thought.  And think of the durability of those contributions as they move from life to life, without anyone even knowing their point of origin was a lecture you gave.   If you are right, Lew, if reincarnation is real and there is an upward progression to greater and greater consciousness and goodness, think of what might be next after a life as rich as this one.  The word “Wow!” would be appropriate.

                                              ***

He is laying on his bed talking about the final arrangements.  He has written his own obit, as he calls it.  He doesn’t want Anne to worry about it and he certainly doesn’t want someone who never really knew him slapping it together.  He will be cremated.  There will be no memorial service because he doesn’t need it, nor does Anne.  They know who they have been to each other.  All these years, he has had a nickname for her, a term of endearment in French.  Perfect, because she was also a French teacher. Perfect because uttering it was a daily gift.  Perfect because it implied both heaven and earth, defying and submitting to gravity.  Perfect.

                                              ***

I am sitting outside on the front steps of his house while he naps inside.  I notice the Japanese cherry tree in full bloom a few feet away.  Further down the lawn, the dogwood’s flowers are just emerging from their own buds and still cherry colored themselves.  On the other side of the lawn, a forty foot high maple is beginning to leaf.  I remember our childhood yard.  We had a Japanese cherry.  We had a dogwood under which I wrote and drew about the heroic exploits of Little Lewie.  We also had a maple from which we took the wing-like seeds, split them and stuck them on our noses.  Is this coincidence?  Accidental poetry?  Is it our mother and father’s hands reaching beyond the grave to shape our choices?  Is it proof of the themes that move with us from one life to the next?  Is it a montage of more images from mirrors within mirrors and windows with a little wriggle room?

                                            ***

My brother Lew has cancer.

It is tempting to think of the situation as a battle.  So many people do.  We can say that cancer is The Claw and The Fist and Lew and all those helping him are Tookie.  But the war metaphor doesn’t seem accurate.  In the war metaphor, if a person dies, then he has lost.  He is a loser.  But in my brother, I do not see a loser.  I see courage.  I see curiosity.  I see concern and gratitude and love.  A person can die badly or well.  My father, my mother and my oldest brother, Larry died well, with surprising clarity.  To die well is not a loss.  It is not a victory.  It is a beautiful gift to both yourself and those who love you.  It has so many layers and colors and movements.  It is music, art and poetry in one final act.  That is what I am thinking, sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark, as he sleeps in the room below.

                                            ***

I have to leave early.  Lew is still sleeping.  Anne comes out to say goodbye.  We kiss and go to hug and have one of those moments that could be awkward but turns out to be funny and dear…we both move to put our heads on the same side.  We haven’t hugged enough to have it down.  We will no doubt be doing a lot more.  We’ll get good at it.  She encourages me to go into the bedroom.  Lew is turned on his right hip, curled up, looking to me about eight years old.  I lean over and kiss him on the forehead and say, “I love you.”  He wakes up and thanks me again for coming and says we’ll talk soon.  I realize on the way to the airport that he didn’t have his hearing aid in.  He didn’t hear me say I love you.  I will say it again and again between now and “We know where this is going.”

On my way home, in the airport men’s room, I catch a sideways glimpse of myself in the mirror.  For a second, I think I am looking at Lew.  This happens more and more lately.  I catch a glimpse in a car or shop window and see my father or our older brother, Larry, or Lew. 

I am me and not me.  I carry the family with me.  Even my mother shows up in the mirror from time to time.   Is this a resonance from my earliest days when I struggled as the youngest to enter into the sphere of everyday exchanges?  Do I carry a primal uncertainty about who I am; or being the youngest, am I designated to carry the memories, the images, the family history, the endlessly rearranging montage of who we were and might have been?                                              

                                                ***

Over Arizona, the red landscape, the edge of the Grand Canyon, areas blackened by the shadows of clouds.  It looks like a cancerous lung to me now.

                                                ***

As little kids, Lew and I share a bedroom.  When Mom and Dad have said good night and gone downstairs out of earshot, Lew brings out the flashlight he has been hiding under his pillow.  The show begins.  He projects shadow characters on the ceiling with his hand.  There is The Fist.  There is The Claw.  These are not good guys.  But then, there is Tookie.  Tookie is the shadow of two fingers.  Tookie is our hero.  He leads us through endless adventures.  We lie with our eyes fixed on the ceiling.  I’m sure Lew doesn’t know from one moment to the next what his characters are going to do.  They take on a life of their own.  Somehow, with the exploits of The Claw and The Fist being played out above us each night, the daytime reports of “scary” Russians and Chinese and nuclear bombs from which we are drilled to hide under our desks at school are not so scary.  We have Tookie on our side.  Tookie will keep us safe. 

                                                ***

Another clear set of memories.  As kids, we say, “I love you,” all the time.  Mostly to Mom and Dad…and they to us.  I love you Mommy.  I love you Daddy.  I love you Bobby, Lew, Larry.  Then, somewhere along the way as our ages require two numbers, it stops.  Years later, when Dad is dying, then Larry, then Mom, those words come back to us.  Not as musical little toss-offs but definitive statements we enter, tentatively at first, but then with full ownership.  It’s as if we lost love’s seeds for years and ultimately found them in the bottoms of our pockets where they’d been waiting all along to be taken out one by one, delicately, between finger and thumb, to plant in each other’s hearts.  We were gardeners as children.  We learned it from our parents.  Then lost it…then found it again, thank God, in time. 

I love you Mom. 

I love you Dad.

I love you Larry.

I love you Lew. 

I love you Tookie. 

I see you, even in the dark…especially in the dark.

I see you gazing back at me

                                   in true communion.

C 2013 Bob Kamm