Still Sundays

March 27th.

Maybe life actually begins only when we start remembering. Understanding the ‘hereafter’ like my father. Deep waters of truth run in stillness.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

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It’s Sunday again. Did I even take the price tag off the days leading up to today?

It’s March 27th. Soon it will be April. Three months into 2011. Flashes of 2008 come and go like ghosts not willing to accept the exorcism that is life.

It’s still very cold in New York City. We had a glimmer of spring, one beautiful day, only to be replaced by the continuation of what now seems like the longest winter I can recall. Is it long because I am so aware? Is this the price for being aware? Of being ‘present’ in the moment? Time stretches around me, a clear durable plastic  cling wrap, to preserve something.

“How can you have no sense of time again and again?”

I do. It’s not that I don’t  have sense of time, I have many senses and there are many times.

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No one would believe me if I told them I actually resist sitting in the chair of stillness on Sunday mornings to eat the breakfast of words. I write ‘no one’ as if I am writing for someone. By this I neither mean that I don’t expect someone to read my words nor do I mean that I don’t have one—at the very least—intended reader. It is just that when you bring yourself into this grand arena of stillness the world fades. No matter how many relate with you thereafter or cheer you for some truth, you stepped into the field alone, prepared as best as you can against whatever may come. All real artists in the end are gladiators. I don’t know if I am an artist by any standards but I do know there is a fight. Most nights I think I am on the right side.

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Earlier this week I stepped out of the yoga studio into unexpected sleet and passed a man assisting an elderly woman in her wheelchair. They were coming out of the restaurant around the yoga studio. The woman’s shawl was dragging and semi-stuck in the wheel of the wheel-chair. She was frustrated as was the man assisting her: hard to hold an umbrella under pellets of ice, heavy winds and fix her large shawl and jacket. I offered to hold the umbrella. There was no social interaction. It was too windy and cold for all. My umbrella had already cracked on my way to yoga. We were all expecting heavy rain but not sleet and light snow.

The woman in the wheelchair scowled at me and the man, whatever his relation: son? son-in-law? grandson? He said thank you and she just stared past me, embarrassed and frustrated, and then all of us continued onto our designated destinations. Your shawl reminded me of my grandmother on my father’s side, I didn’t say to either of them but have been thinking about my grandmother ever since.

I hardly think about my grandmother on my father’s side. Actually, I don’t. I want to be ashamed or sad to admit this but I am not.  She suffered from severe Parkinson’s and was in a wheelchair most of my youth and died at a rather early age: all scrawny, crippled, shriveled, barely weighing 70 pounds. I don’t ever remember her not in a wheelchair. She was a very anxious and paranoid personality. I was never very close to her or at least that is how I recall. She was very deeply protective.  Her laughter was as unmistakably hers and hers alone as was her stare.  When she laughed one was certain the vibrations could literally light up an entire city. Her gaze could hold an army of men to not as much as blink without her permission. Mostly she was haunted by nightmares and these ‘others’.  She was also an incredible cook, my mother learned cooking from her—everyone did. She was a brutal instructor in the kitchen.

Kids forgive easily. I was a forgiving child naturally. So when I had been reprimanded for playing in trees too long, I would easily forget about the scolding once she would call my brother and I so as to hold and hug us: that she was just really worried someone was going to come get us. It is hard to hug someone in a wheelchair but not when you are nine or ten. You don’t think about any kind of loving hug as awkward at that age. She had amazingly soft skin and always smelled like the perfume counter at the most expensive department store. I would offer a photograph of her for she was gorgeous but all photos of her last twenty years look sad, depressed, and scowling. Some of this was due to medications, some due to lack of control of facial expressions because of Parkinson’s, some because of her innate personality.

There is no guilt in not thinking about someone for a long time. After all, here I am now writing about it. When you are left to your own devices to extract bullets of unexpected memories, you deal with all the other times you haven’t thought about something.

Maybe life actually begins only when we start remembering.

The challenge is to set those memories on the shelf of now because memories are not in the now.

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My mother lost her mother a year before I was born. My mother was barely twenty-three. I tell my mother I could never manage losing her. My mother says, “You would be surprised. Besides I have failed if none of you can continue without me.”

My birthday is coming up next month—maybe this is the birthday when one begins to start thinking about how limited our time is on this earth. Not our own but others before us.

I ask my mother how did she manage without her mother. She says all because of my father. “I never understood ‘death’ until your father. He understands ‘death’ in a manner very few do.”  And it is true. Many people still come to talk to my father after they have lost someone. My father doesn’t talk about ‘death’ to us like that though. His “messages” slip here and there through the cracks of other conversations.

My father understands the ‘hereafter.’ He is not afraid of death. He says this is because he is not afraid of life and all living is really a series of choices and risks.

What about living do I so fear that losing loved ones to death scares me?

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Someone with whom I haven’t spoken in months called me this morning to argue  about truth: subjective truth, objective truth, the truth, uncertain truth. I was still without tea and had barely woken from a dreamless sleep, a rare occasion. Phone calls on Sunday mornings are reserved for a select few only. I hung up.

A few minutes later New York City artist De La Vega’s mother (I am very close to her, not the artist himself) sent me a text, a quote by her son, “Use truth to set free what lies underneath.”

That’s what sinking in stillness does: facing truths that are raw real. No armor.

How long can you hold your breath under the deep waters of truth?

Deep waters of truth run in stillness.

~a.q.s.

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