Every bathtub needs a window.
Like with the adobe cottage we rented for a while in San Cristobal, the bathroom in this old adobe has a smallish window high up on the wall beside the tub. When I stand up to take a shower, I can look out to see sunshine and mountains, or feel the breeze on my face. This evening as I lay back and settled in for a long soak, I heard them through the screen: crickets, thank God!
Something had made me want to turn in early. My wife was away in Colorado, and I had pretty much run out of enthusiasm for much of anything by around 9:00 p.m. That’s usually when I start to come awake, but it had been a strange day all around. I felt as if I had a lot of inner sorting-out to do, not the kind you work at consciously, though. This was more a case of feeling that I simply had to stop. Just stop, and let the anxiety settle down. I also had a sense of needing to be reprogrammed from on high, as it were, an intuited directive to await further instructions. Very unusual for one so previously guilt-driven as myself, to just lie down and trust the universe. I live for long hot baths that transition into bedtime, so that was what I did.
These crickets were loud. Probably right outside in the lilac bush, I figured.
As I lay there in the dark — my favorite way to take a bath — I remembered how the crickets back home in Maryland, three million light-years away, helped set me on my current path way back in ’98. I was standing in the backyard in the twilight, probably after having closed the garage, when I noticed that the crickets had suddenly disappeared, or had they? Turning toward the house, I was startled to hear the sounds returning. I stopped in my tracks and slowly turned my head, first one way and then the other: oh Jesus, it was me! High-frequency hearing loss in one ear or the other made the crickets’ music fall or rise, depending on the orientation of my head. As the first undeniable proof of irreversible physical decline, this hit me like a two-by-four. I felt so sorry for myself, I even cried.
Considering that I was already 53 years old, you’d think I’d have had a more enlightened outlook, but that “immortality” thing dies hard. Later on, when I was wrestling with the unbearable fear associated with breaking up our old life to move to New Mexico, I’d recall “the crickets,” or rather the absence of them in my ears, to bolster my resolve: if not now, when? I had to do this NOW, because my body was shutting down. I had to take the risk.
That was 10 long years ago. I don’t know who that person was who did such crazy things, can’t get inside his head for love or money. I remember that my wife was burning out professionally and that our lives were falling apart. I didn’t want to cut the grass any more. I didn’t want to clean the basement. I didn’t even want to drive to town, I just wanted to flee.
So there I was last night, 10 years later, lying in the bathtub. One cricket singing through the open window was especially loud, and I found this oddly soothing in a way I’d never quite experienced before. I felt that all I was meant to do, at that moment and maybe for the rest of my life, was lie there and listen. It was like the good part of being in a church. Just listen and be saved. BECOME the sound of the cricket, dissolve into the ocean of life.
I went to bed soon afterwards. Alone, of course, and way before the normal hour. There was nothing on my mind. Six hours later I woke up and sat down to write this post at 4:00 a.m. I knew I’d been dreaming, dense unremembered dreams, the kind that make you wake up tired, as if you’d been walking all night long instead of sleeping.
It’s almost quarter to six now, and I’m crawling back between the cool clean sheets. I need to go a little farther, and maybe when I wake up, I’ll remember where I’ve been.
UPDATE: There’s a book that fills in a lot of what happened after I found my hearing was shot. How we came to be here, etc. Buffalo Lights: Maryland to New Mexico. Buy a copy and feel better right away.
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