February Cold

Of course Dad got cold once in a while. Sure. He had to. We lived in Central New York. I still do. It gets cold. Snow falls sometimes more than a foot in a day. I remember how cold I was playing youth football in freezing rain while he stood on the sidelines with the other dads who all looked frozen. Dad wore no hat, held no umbrella, just smoked his cigarettes. He had to be cold. No doubt.

Except I wonder.

Driving to my job this morning I was desperate for the car to warm up. Come on, come on, come on, I said. I kept checking the vent with my bare hand then blowing into my fist trying to keep from shaking. Some of this was the cold, some was not having dressed warmly, and some was the anxiety I feel every day I drive toward my job. Whatever the case, I felt cold and got to thinking about Dad.

Of course he got cold, but I don't remember hearing him say so. He had to have said so once or twice but if so it didn't stick with me. Instead, he's the guy who went out in the cold in a light jacket or his funeral directing suit, felt hat, overcoat left open, and maybe a pair of black leather gloves. I remember being cold and complaining about it while he listened. His teeth never chattered.

I'm thinking these things having just marked the fourth anniversary of Dad's death. Mom and I spent the day together and at one point she asked how I'm dealing with him being gone. I'm good, I told her. It's what I usually say to that kind of question, but I felt it this time. I'm good. When he died I thought I would have to find some way to put him away, to not think about him, to let him go. I thought I would grieve and then Dad would be gone so that I could go on. Instead, I grieved and continue to grieve, but I turn toward him and his memory and it's not like he's still here, but I'm not alone. I write about him often, think of him even more, mark the dates that matter (anniversary, birthday, when he bought his funeral home, the day he died), and spend maybe too much time comparing myself to him.

Which is why I felt wrong giving in so much to being cold this morning. It's why I worry that I'm supposed to cope with my awful job which has become more than I can bear. Dad never seemed to find anything too much for his strengths.

Then I remember the job he left to buy the funeral home. He had to get out. He hung in a long time, even after buying his own place, and ran both businesses, but eventually, for reasons I can easily imagine now, he quit that other job. His business wasn't making ends meet. There were signs it might not ever. Quitting the other job was messy, dangerous even. But I know something now: staying in the job was a messier and more dangerous choice than leaving.

Of course Dad got cold. He didn't say much about it. That was his way. He didn't talk a lot about himself and he hardly ever spoke of things being difficult or over his head. I was his child — I still am — and I still enjoy thinking of him as towering, powerful, capable of anything, maybe everything. But I know he was cold. There's that line somebody or other wrote: he was a man, take him for all in all. Men and women reach their breaking points. Teeth chatter, hands go cold, death comes eventually or suddenly. And when we are alone in our frozen cars driving toward a job that feels toxic and venomous, sometimes we cry out for mercy. The traffic pays us no mind.

When I imagine Dad in those situations, he looks and sounds almost exactly like me.

Begin It

"Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it.
Action has magic, grace and power in it."
(Goethe, qtd by Dani Shapiro in Devotion, 236-237)

I have begun bgfay.com and have 49 subscribers. I've begun a writer's Twitter account and am getting the hang of providing a service to other writers. I have begun the difficult process of quitting my job before it debilitates me even further than it already has. I'm meeting with two friends to discuss a business idea that felt almost too foolish to say out loud but which, now that I've had the courage to say it, they think is an idea worth exploring.

Nothing is done. Nothing will be done. Not until death. Aiming for done is foolish, dangerous. I'm never done.

That bothers me more than I would like. By now I hoped to have accepted such things. Acceptance is another thing that is never done, damn it. I am always in the process of learning to accept. It all feels like failure but might instead be growth. Slow growth but growth nonetheless. Still, it feels like failing over and over every day of my life.

Having begun, I am finding new ideas. Hundreds of things come up for the blog. I keep finding things I to give on Twitter — not just post but give — because one thing leads to another. Talking about how difficult my job has become, how ill it is making me, has led to possibilities I didn't know before. I thought I was trapped. Beginning releases me. My friends and I have talked for an hour about the business idea. We will talk more and draw up plans.

Action begets actions. Beginning is progress.

I began the morning with slowly realizing my alarm was sounding for a second time. My first decision of the day was to turn it off. The second decision was more challenging: get up despite how tired and anxious I feel or stay in the warm comfort of doing nothing? I chose to get up and began doing it. I began the day.

Beginning, moving into action has left me touched by magic, grace, and power. What else can I do? What else might I begin?

Shoveling the Driveway After A Terrible Snow As Night And The Temperature Descend Into A Cold Fit For The Dead

I hold the snow shovel in my corporeal and gloved hands. The snow is terribly deep. It's beyond pushing down the drive and into the road and has to be taken one shovel at a time. It's nothing that can be done quickly. There is a process to it. A slow process. I lift a shovel-full and throw it high over the wall feeling it throughout body, mind, maybe even heart and soul. It's all too much, I think, this snow that I have to clear. I couldn't possibly. Then I dig the shovel in and throw it again.

Dad leans reluctantly on his old metal shovel with the wooden handle he wrapped in black tape where it began to split forty years ago. There's a chunk out of the metal edge where he tried to pry something up with it. Maybe ice. Maybe something ridiculous. The shovel and he have come back looking just as they had the day before he died or whatever day it was that he and I last shared this life. He would have preferred to come back younger, stronger, but the living bring back the dead as they wish, never the other way around. Dad excepts this, accepts what I've given him.

He has taken up smoking again. Why the hell not, his expression says as I watch him strike the match and cup it close to his face where it shines in his glasses. Then the smoke hides his eyes and blows out past me. I can't smell anything and wonder if it's just his breath floating on the frozen breeze like mine. No, I think. It's certainly not that. Right Dad, I say. He wipes his nose with a gloved hand. That old leather glove is worn, stained with grease and oil. He touches the top of the old knit hat he still wears. It's one I cast aside at ten as unfashionable. Nothing wrong with it, his shrug says. I exhale and it's as if he has blown a cloud of smoke across me.

I survey the driveway I've cleared, the snow left to shovel. Percentages, that's what I'm calculating. Dad looks. He thinks in fractions. I say, about two-thirds to go, my breath blowing hard away from us. He nods. The afternoon sky has gone dark and the snowstorm is giving way slowly to falling temperatures. We're headed down below zero, frigid, breath-stealing cold.

Dad finishes his cigarette and tosses the butt in a pile of snow I've thrown over the wall. It doesn't fizzle but disappears. He holds the handle of the shovel like a tool but uses it as a staff, something to hold him up or hold him here. I tell him to rest, just take it easy, Dad. Be here with me.

I dig in the shovel and throw snow high up out of the driveway. Again and again. Dad stands and watches. There's no hurry. The streetlight at the foot of the drive flickers to life as I throw another shovel of snow up high over the wall. The wind catches it, blows it back at me, right through where Dad stands. That snow blinds me. I'm so tired. I rub my eyes with the back of my glove and open them again worried, anxious that I'm alone. The night is growing so cold and though the streetlight illuminates all the work left for me on this Earth it has put out every single star in the heavens. I dig the shovel in and throw it hard against the blowing wind.

Copying Passages

from Devotion by Dani Shapiro, 159-160

The great yogi B. K. S. Iyngar once wrote, “The moment you say ‘I have got it,’ you have lost everything you had. As soon as something comes, you have to go one step further. Then there is evolution. The moment you say ‘I am satisfied with that,’ that means stagnation has come. That is the end of your learning; you have closed the windows of your intellect. So let me do what I cannot do, not what I can do.”

I was in no danger of self-satisfaction. I had arrived at an understanding of all I could not do, which felt like reaching the edge of the world. Once I realized that the things I had habitually used to prop myself up (the new pair of shoes, the good piece of news, the great review, whatever) were as fleeting as a sugar rush, they lost their luster. I had spent years—my whole life!—taping myself together like so many torn bits of paper, bolstering myself up with ephemera. What was I supposed to use to hold myself together, now they were gone? Oh, what’s that you say? The idea is not to hold myself together at all?

It felt as if another step, and I would free-fall. Another step, and who knew what would happen? There was no stopping, no pausing. Truly, there was no comfort. How long had I been at this? A year? Two? It was no time at all, in the greater scheme of things, and here I was. I had arrived—in the words of Thomas Merton—at an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and apparent chaos. This, Merton believed, was the only point at which faith was possible. But most days, I felt the chaos without the faith.

I had entered the closest thing to a solitary life that was reasonable for me, given both my nature and my circumstances. I spent my days alone. I didn’t answer the phone. I sat at my desk, walked the dogs, got p and stretched, sat back down. I lit a fire in the fireplace, unrolled my mat, practiced yoga. I sat on my zafu and meditated for fifteen minutes, twenty. I went back to my desk. Eventually three o’clock rolled around, or four, and it was time for Jacob to come home from school. I didn’t know how to transition from one to the other: from hermit to mom. From silence to homework. From inwardness to snack-making and Honey, how was your day. I struggled to get inside myself, and then—as if trapped there—I struggled to get back out. (159-160)

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I have for many years typed things that other people have written in order to have become part of me. As a kid I typed lyrics on Mom's college typewriter. For years I've typed poetry into the computer. Now it's a chapter of Dani Shapiro's Devotion today). I wanted to remember and have all those lyrics. I needed to be able to keep the poems I had begun to love. And now, more often than not and certainly in the case of the Shapiro quote, I want to take the ideas in and weave them into my DNA. Typing these things, copying them out like some medieval scribe imprints them on me. I am made a better person, someone with more ideas who yearns beyond what I even thought possible.

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Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it. (Goethe, qtd in Devotion, 236-237)

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In the back of my notebook, working from the last page forward until I meet up with the writing I have done starting from the front and working back, are quotes from the things that I read. I've often thought I should collect all these, type them into my computer, maybe create a database. Of course that would be too much work. It would take away from reading more books, writing more words, being a person in the world. Still, the idea lingers until I remember that I have already copied them down. It is enough. Perhaps I'll return to them but probably not.

Devotion is a book to which I can imagine returning, but I probably won't because I haven't yet read everything she has written. Inside the copy I borrowed from the library was a check out receipt from another patron who on the first of May last year took out three of Shapiro's books. I imagine that person and the image comes to mind easily, looking very much like me or however a person looks when they are seeking something and, holding three books in their hand, feels that they are well on their way, that some kind of understanding is inside those pages. They rush home, find a quiet place, and open to page one.

I can't wait to read Inheritance. I have so much to learn.