Still Sundays

I used to write on Sunday mornings smack dab in the middle of Broadway.

Yes.

In dead center of the biggest and longest running avenue in New York City. The benches in the median dividing the opposite flow of traffic always felt like some rising from the Earth.

On 108^th and Broadway. Not 109^th.  Not 110^th. But 108^th. As if that is some exact spot where Manhattan could be peeled and split open like an orange.

There is a small, beautiful park near by that I could go too, but no, I would always end up sitting on a bench that faces south, looking at where Broadway splits off to West End. On the bottom of the grand canyon made of residential buildings, staring on top of one where there is a water tower that continues to fascinate me.

I like to feel spaces where the Earth rounds.

Earth is some marvelous circus and I am on a unicycle learning how to balance. Is it all a performance after all?

Some Sunday mornings someone on the bench would have coffee next to me. Quietly. Everyone respects the silence of a bench. But really early in the morning, the bench is front row seating to watch harmless, homeless people or junkies walk by.

Junkie.

We are all love junkies.

Here I am today. For the first time this year.

I walked for a long time this morning as if to stretch as far away as possible from the words for fiction from last night. Sometimes we wish to place certain thoughts on a shelf of a different decade. I need a custom-made cabinet for centuries.

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Some things remain hard to talk about even if they no longer hurt.

My mother told me on our way to the airport last week that she wishes she could have always been as expressive as she is now. I was shocked.

What is it about a drive to the airport that sucks something from the marrow of anticipation?

She said she just can’t adequately articulate or express emotions better, that perhaps her family just wasn’t as expressive as my father’s and that is why. I reminded her about all the wonderful words she had written inside cards that she had given to all of us all these years. I told her she allows us to hug her for a really long time. I didn’t understand: what was she talking about?

I was surprised to find her wiping tears of frustration. I reassured her that she was very affectionate and loving and expressed herself quite clearly.

“I wasn’t always like this,” she said.

No she wasn’t. Not like she is now.

Once inside the plane I thought about her frustration. I  decided every one of us feels unsatisfied to some degree when it comes to adequately having expressed our feelings, especially feelings of gratitude and love.

V.G. says that yes, indeed, real communication takes place without words. It is just that not everyone knows that language that is anything but silent. So we speak words and hear an echo translation in dream thoughts.

It doesn’t matter how you verbally express love then, love runs on the current of courage. The courage required to feel gratitude, to feel love,  sparkles without words. And I don’t know anyone more courageous than my mother and for this reason primarily—her willingness to change into the person she wanted to become. She wanted to become more expressive and she is passionately so now.

Every time you choose to outgrow some part of yourself, it’s not as if the part you outgrew is no longer visible to you. It need not haunt, but it is there. You are never too far from who you were. Living with that knowledge requires strength and courage.

She has often said that she learned to become strong and I was just born strong. I think it is  better to come into your strength than being born with it—you can destroy much in your way if you are born with it.

When you read this as you sometimes do mama, I want you to know this: I felt loved, protected, supported, unconditionally. That is more important than how you remember expressing that love, mama.

I was on the phone with someone last night very dear to me and felt myself pulled by the undertow where words drown even the minimal one can express. The sound of “I love you” felt like “Have a bite” so I didn’t even say that.

I am over words: now I can finally finish writing the manuscript.

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John Keats wrote, “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.”

It is not the same for dreams. Only dreams you can hear are sweet and unheard dreams bang like memories begging for some change.

There is some dream where in the reflection of another you meet yourself. A wordless paradise.

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It’s a Sunday popping and bursting of stillness.

It’s also father’s day. I thank my father for teaching us it is indeed a sin to kill a mockingbird and people’s dreams are mockingbirds if you listen carefully.

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