"...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
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