The Bear

Inspired by "My Friend the Bear" by Jim Harrison

"...Where I keep the bear...I found her as an orphan three years ago, bawling against the dead carcass of her mother...We embrace ear to ear, her huge head on my shoulder, her breathing like a God's"

I know this bear with huge head and breathing like a God's.
She has hugged me with her whole body, and it is an otherworldly experience to be so enveloped.

The night I told my best friend Monica my parents were getting divorced we were sitting on the gaudy lavender couch with lemon flowers.  We were surrounded by Jesus, not the actual Jesus, but wooden framed tributes of a man in the clouds, a man who had never done anything for me.
This was Monica's house, dainty porcelain statues of saints and mothers glowed with the moon.  All of it echoed a home holier than mine.
We were in 7th grade.  I had yet to develop hips or breasts or get my period.

The living room was dark and quiet in the way that makes my tummy tickle.
From the hallway shadow cave, Monica's mama bear came softly in.
She wore less than I'd ever seen her wear, just a thin white silky nightgown over her hefty body.
Her hair was a tiny bun, over which she usually she wore wigs of luxurious curls, but not tonight.
She was without her weighty clip-on earrings of diamonds and onyx.
That night her face was immaculate like one who had never lied.

She came to the couch without saying a word.  She sat behind me and wrapped her velvet arms of dough around my 13 year old body.  I let myself cry into her, knowing it would be the last time I was aloud to be held as a child by a mother.
I pressed my eyes into the pillow of her arm and dropped all my tears.  They came up from the depths of a place I could never find my way back to now.  I didn't want to stop.  I knew that when I looked up everything would be different.  The hard shell of my chrysalis was already forming, already inhibiting my vision and blocking out innocence.  I just wanted to stay tucked under her chin like the fold of a napkin.
She never did say a word.

That same year Monica and her Mom moved to Roosevelt Utah.
I started high school without my best friend or my Mom.

I discovered the lightness of feet as I ran from the school doors at full sprint.
I flew from the principal, from boredom, from normal and landed on the slippery seats of Kyle Reese's vintage Ford Galaxy.  We all piled in, a band of lost children.  We went to Denny's and ate hearty breakfast.  We drove to the mountains and talked about poetry, skateboarding, train-hopping and everything which lay before us uncharted.  We fed our souls because no one else would.
 I discovered adults really don't know what they're doing half the time and they don't deserve my trust.  I learned they only have power over me if I believe their authority is real.  I decided it wasn't.

I did carry an old photo of my Mom, though.  It was from when she still had red hair like mine, before she bleached the color out.  Her eyes were soft with no make-up.  Around her neck laid a delicate gold chain with a seagull flying from the end of it.
I couldn't fault that version of her.  In that picture she was me, her eyes still saw tiny prayers to Jesus everywhere.  I knew that no one had given her the answers yet.  Not then, and not now.

My Friend the Bear

Down in the bone myth of the cellar
of this farmhouse, behind the empty fruit jars
the whole wall swings open to the room
where I keep the bear.  There's a tunnel
to the outside of the far wall that emerges
in the lilac grove in the backyard
but she rarely uses it, knowing there's no room
around her for a freewheeling bear.
She's not a dainty eater so once a day
I shovel shit while she lopes in playful circles.
Privately she likes religion—from the bedroom
I hear her incantatory moans and howls
below me—and April 23rd, when I open
the car trunk and whistle at midnight
and she shoots up the tunnel, almost airborne
when she meets the night.  We head north
and her growls are less friendly as she scents
the forest-above-the-road smell.  I release
her where I found her as an orphan three
years ago, bawling against the dead carcass
of her mother.  I let her go at the head
of the gully leading down to the swamp,
jumping free of her snarls and roars.
But each October 9th, one day before bear season
she reappears at the cabin frightening
the bird dogs.  We embrace ear to ear,
her huge head on my shoulder,
her breathing like a god's.

  ~ Jim Harrison

I should...

I should sneak out for a run.

My family is plugged in to miscellaneous electronics, and I pull my laces tight.
I think I ought to feel guilty leaving them this way...but I am actually delighted.
On the nimble feet of my teenage self, I tiptoe out the window.
Using my thin spider legs, I slip into the mischevious night.

The tops of trees make a web across the sky and I skim over it.
Each time I think this may be hard, or I may be old, I relax into my muscles and my breathing.
I become light again.

This practice has been with me for 18 years.
I don't run to be fast or strong, not really.
I run to realize where I am.

As I walk back to the house with the last air digesting, I see Pepper.
I see our morning walk to preschool.
I see her be so small on the crunchy rocks with her feet in sunday shoes.
Her satin princess cape ripples over the gravel.
Wild hair unfurls from the top of her crown.
I see Beckam in the rickety old stroller, his fat calves pudging out from his seat.
I see myself, tired or not tired in my sweats and weak ponytail.
And I know:  it is all good, even this small memory.
Life can grow from here, we have more than enough of what is important.
Green shoots up from every crack along the concrete track back to my house.
It is over now, like a dream this scene fades as quickly as I can recall it.
She is already in kindergarten.
I can only remember preschool Pepper for a moment when I walk this sidewalk.
Like an unexpected angel, I revel in her presence.
Soon this memory will be replaced by an older version of her, and Beckam will tower over both of us.

When I return to my house, it is with open eyes and plenty of space to receive what I find.

Ashes of Glittering Fire.

"Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song."

            ~ Mary Oliver excerpt from the poem Humpbacks

This is the ocean, this place of glittering fire.

Getting ready to receive Gary's ashes
Greeting the water.

Right now I want to cry because it is the place where I splayed my uncle Gary's ashes in wide fans along the current.  I want to cry because I waited 9 years to swim him out to sea. It took that long for Aunt Robbie to be ready to release her partner, to let him diffuse back into the tides.
I thought the task would be heavy, sodden ashes sinking fast and the weight of it on me as I tread water.  I was afraid my legs could not hold us both up, could not pump fast enough.

He said as he lay waiting for cancer to take him, "I want my ashes sent into the ocean and I want Sarah to take them there."
I'm crying because when I actually dove into the water and felt her familiar brush along my lower back, my thighs and streaming from my toes, I came up smiling.  I knew this was not a sad thing.  It took my breath away to know this, and I sat ebbing in the tide with a full chest.  I've never written about it because I've been afraid I could not do justice to the grace I found in the water that day.  Maybe this is why Aunt Robbie waited so long.

She wanted every detail to be perfect.  We spent over $200 on flowers from the markets of downtown Los Angeles.  I think it was Wall Street.  The sidewalks smelled like piss and I saw whole logs of feces in the gutter.  I kept my daughter close as we moved briskly through a paradox of homeless, brown wanderers and brilliant blossoms of every color.  The blossoms billowed out from cardboard cylinders and I couldn't help but find them equally tragic to the street addicts who were their neighbors. Both were so full of life yet doomed to die too soon.  We chose colors of purple and yellow.  We bought orchids and hydrangea and roses to throw into the water.

The flowers and my daughter Sophie

On the boat there was fresh coffee and pastries.  The sun came out with unexpected fervor.  We took off our jackets and lifted our faces to her from the white-washed deck.  Again I was surprised by how bright everything was in spite of the occasion.
The navy came in crisp white and played the trumpet because Gary was a firefighter for 36 years.
I was struck, by how handsome government ceremony can be.

The boat captain also wore white.  He was straight and tall with a good sense of humor.
"Who is the diver?"  He asked.
Once again I felt inadequate.  I am not a diver, only a strong swimmer and lover of the water, but I stepped forward.
There was some confusion about my diving without certification.  He said it was not permissible.  Absolutely not.  Perhaps today would not be so perfect after all.
Then he found out I would wear no scuba gear.  Only fins and my bare skin.
"Oh, well that's just fine," he smiled.  "No problem there."

Aunt Robbie wanted me to wear a wet suit.

Back to shore wearing the necklace of Gary's ashes.

"I really don't think I'll need it," I told her.  But I smiled and let her rent one from Sport Chalet anyway, just in case the water was choppy or too cold.

But when I got out onto that ocean, when I smelled her salt, and heard her roar, I could not dishonor her by pulling a thick layer of rubber between us.  I knew I could trust the water to do her part.  I would do mine.
Uncle Gary would understand this.  He was a diver for 50 years.  He took dive lessons from Mel's dive shop at age 14.  At age 21 he was the youngest trained scuba instructor to come out of LA county's UICC (underwater instructor certification course)  He died September 6, 2005 at 64 years old. His true love was apnea (breath hold) or free diving.  He did not like the encumbrance of tanks, preferring to kick freely and swim, to turn as a dolphin might.
The water was his mother, as she is mine.  I know she will not hurt me.  If I trust her and swim when it is time to swim...float when it is time to float.  She will hold me.

I loved my Uncle Gary.  He took me snorkeling on the So. Cal coast.  I wore a coral one piece swimming suit.  I was 14 years old, my hair wild as a lion in the coastal air.  He let me wear his fins and his snorkel.  He gave me a small knife and taught me how to rip muscles off the rocks.  I'd pry them open and take the meat underwater to feed the fish.  They swarmed around me in a solid current like a dream.  The ocean opened her twinkling jewelry box.  She let me turn over her treasures in my hands, with fingers that glowed white under water.  I floated on my belly, suspended between two worlds and marveled at how I could be in the water and yet there was endless air.
He let me stay... and stay...and stay while he kept watch, my casual sentinel.  He didn't bother me about time or sunblock.  He just held his post on the rocks, a wise old seagull, smiling, assuring me I could take all the time I wanted. He knew what was happening.  He knew I was falling in love.

In the water with Gary's ashes October 2014

As I released his ashes to the water, all I felt was joy through my entire body.  My legs pumping hard in the fins, keeping me upright and worthy of my faith in them.
"Do you see it!  How beautiful it is?  Can you see it!" I shouted up to the people on the boat.
They looked down to me from another world, from a world I had just left.
I wanted to stay here with Gary, and felt I knew him better in that moment than I ever had when he was alive.
As the last trace of grey dispersed to blue, I tipped back into the cradle of waves.  I let them hold me as my chest expanded, a natural buoy.  I can still close my eyes and conjure it, that depth of breath.
My body became a thin flat film over the water, and I don't know how long I laid there.  I felt the captain yelling to me.  I looked up to find he was smiling wide at me from the boat deck,
"You gonna stay out there forever?"

"I would if I could," I told him, and he smiled even wider.

Chasing Night Fish

I am manic and I can feel it.
When I breath in simple oxygen it is like nitrous filling my nasal cavities with sugar.
I lay awake at 5 am trying to convince myself that healthy people sleep more than this.
I inhale the nitrous sugar and would rather be upright...writing.
My head is loud, but not with worthy or actual obsessions.  Someone left the radio on and they are scanning the channels, just skipping from commercial...pop-song...talk show interview.  I am not attached to any of these stations, but I cannot turn it off.
Only two play real music.  The running channel and the writing channel.
Now that I am a bit older, I prefer the writing channel.  My knees are grateful.

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” 

Allen Ginsberg

The cats carry me down the hall on their tide of mini-meows for food.
I press the coffee button on my trusty, maroon coffee pot.  The one I got for Christmas the same year I got the Crock Pot which sits in it's groove in the cupboard.  Untouched and misunderstood.

I pull my hair into a cascade ponytail at the top of my head and wonder when I will wash it again.
Probably after I work-out today...or tomorrow.
It is the color of autumn sun.  That's what Micah from high school used to call it.  We would go out to my '72 Impala across the street from Viewmont high school and make out.  He wasn't a very good kisser, but he understood the Beat poets, and there was a knowing in his eyes.  Now he has a thick beard and still works at a brewery downtown even though he is 37.  He probably still understands those Beat poets too.

He was always headin' off to Ketchum Idaho which is where Hemingway died, and I'm reading a book about his wife.  Hemingway's wife, whom he calls Hash, and how she fell in love with an alcoholic, which is what my friend is doing right now.  I can see how it happens.  It is fascinating to watch from this far removed seat.  I used to be the star of this movie and now I am 7 rows back in the dark wearing soft sweat pants and bare feet.  Before they become pathetic, alcoholics themselves are intoxicating.  They hurl themselves at the night trying to sucking up every drop of inspiration between the twilight and the dawn.  To dance with them can make you forget.  You can forget there was ever anything worth preserving...not a marriage, or a mortgage, or a car, or a job, or the laundry folded and put away in drawers.  They pull metaphors from the sky and splay them with words like lace over you, while dancing the finest swing step you've ever seen.  They don't miss a beat and their eyes, the way they invite you to join them like fish hooks for your soul.

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge...

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks...

...who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
...with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years."
Allen Ginsberg ~Howl

But in the morning they turn grey.  They hide from the sun, from themselves and when they go dark they leave a vacuum.  Not the normal space of leaving, but a black hole that sucks in and takes more than its' share of light.
I am one who did not die.  One morning I woke up and could find nowhere to run, and no strength for chasing angels.  My body was heavy and real, made of bones and flesh and eyes tired.
I laid down in the dirt to cry, and the angels I had been chasing laid down and cried with me.
Now I tend to my antique store.  Usually I reside peacefully with the artifacts in my care.  I respect them.  I respect what they represent which is my own humanness.  I cannot outrun it or create any great art piece that will not reveal this truth.  No one can.  Not even my teenage idols, not Jack Kerouac or Tom Robbins or Ani DiFranco, or Bukowski, or Gary Snyder (Who I met at the library once and he was a small man with a wide smile.  He didn't die either.) or Ayn Rand or J.D. Salinger...none of them.

Sometimes I still miss the madness though.  And I wonder: is one life better than the other?  Really?
Either way we all die.   So do I die from the dangerous tight-rope that is drinking and hitch-hiking and writing and failing and tasting everything?  Or do I die safely tucked into my insurance plan, my family, my college degree and my antiques?
At the bottom of my question I find the truth:  
                                              I cannot answer that for anyone else.
                                              I can only know my own life.
                                              By the light of the morning which greets me at my window...
                                              I know that my best writing and living and loving is happening now.
                                              It did not happen when I was chasing idols and glittering night fish.
                                              It happens quietly in my sweatpants and coffee sunrise.

I do not fault these artists, these alcoholics for their wild rides.  I am grateful for theirs and for mine.
I don't need to quantify one as better or more worthy than another.  If I ever think this to be necessary, it is because I have forgotten the angels in the dirt.
Were it not for the ride, I would not have fallen there, and the would never have come to me.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

— Jack Kerouac 

The Beats shoot some breeze ... (left to right) painter and musician Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac, poet Gregory Corso (back of head to camera), musician David Amram, and Allen Ginsburg. Photograph: John Cohen/Getty Images