“Teresa idolized you, did you know that?” (Thus wrote cousin Joyce…)
No, I didn’t, actually. As I told my wife this afternoon, “Maybe if I had, I’d have behaved better.” The last 10 years, especially. What with the chaos of the move to New Mexico and subsequent turmoil, lack of funds, and generally having my head up my ass, I didn’t manage to get down to Austin once in all that time. She made it up here twice, though. [Pictured below with her husband at our rented digs in San Cristobal in early 2001]
I had a tendency to hide out then, feeling ashamed at not living up to my full potential, if that makes any sense. The incredibly stressful relocation and subsequent impoverishment, especially after the dot-com bust, left me feeling like one miserable excuse for a grownup, and I wanted to be able to “walk tall” if I went down to visit, instead of being such a distraught, needy bastard.
During one of my lowest periods ever, after my wife had moved to Dubuque to save herself and take care of her mother, when I had literally nothing, living off credit card checks and freezing to death, Teresa sent me a care package from the second-hand clothing stores of Austin containing a vest, heavy knit long-sleeved shirts, and other items. They probably saved my life—they certainly made me more comfortable—and I still wear them! Once during a similar period of grinding poverty and uncertainty in my bachelor days in Maryland, she sent me a giant Tupperware container filled with homemade chocolate chip cookies. Just knowing somebody loved me and hadn’t forgotten about me made a huge difference in my life both times, and those weren’t the only instances where she reached out or did something spontaneous to brighten my life.
And then there was the time of my colossal jerkness. This one is hard:
I’d been living in Austin from December, ’71 into the spring of ’75. We didn’t socialize or see each other a lot, but it was comforting to be living in the same town with family. I remember she was taking photography classes while I was working on the University of Texas grounds crew, raking leaves with a master’s degree. That was nothing unusual at the time—jobs were hard to come by, and half the members of my crew had advanced degrees—but the irony of the situation was remarkable. She found me one day mowing the grass at my alma mater and took a picture that she later mounted and gave me as a present. (I don’t think I realized until writing this what an honoring that was.)
By the summer of ’75, however, I was in the middle of ending a relationship and getting on with my life, which meant leaving Texas to move to Maine and later, Maryland. I was so screwed up and crazy with fear, in fact, that when the day before my departure arrived, I hadn’t yet gone over to her place to say good-bye and would have left town without doing so, if she hadn’t taken it upon herself to come see ME instead.
I can still see her when I opened the door, her eyes red from crying…
On Monday morning, though, I was the one with the tear-streaked face and a broken heart. Not that these are equivalent events, but remembering that time from 35 years ago, the similarity is striking. What we do always comes back, one way or the other.
Better watch your step then, and never, ever turn away from love!
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Most beautifully put, John !!!
Sister love is like no other.
Thank you. I’m posting this so nobody else misses out on the sisters in their lives…
I have always wished I HAD a sister in my life…..am envious of my wife who has 2 sisters and 3 brothers….big families are very fortunate in my opinion….dysfunctional or not!!!
Same with “Walking Tall”…..I totally get that….and have also dealt with such emotions and pride over the recent past…..BUT….I think we all have to just be US…Whatever that is…and LIVE….NOW!!…..(especially since most of us are in the final 1/3 of our lives!!!)
Amen to all that, Steve. I’m done with living in the past and whomping up on myself. NOW is where it’s at.
Here’s a somewhat metaphysical question: Can you really live fully in a present disconnected from the past? I say no. Getting older makes you feel fuller and realer to yourself. I attribute this to the way the passage of time alters your head. Whereas before you saw things kind of one-dimensionally, because you didn’t have much of a past, now you have stereoscopic vision of the unfolding story of yourself over many years. That complexity is something only humans – and maybe the finest humans at that – are capable of. When Hamlet proclaimed “Ripeness is all”, I think he had something like that in mind. But then he also said, “We ripe and ripe until we rot and rot.” I reckon that’s true too.
Can you really live fully in a present disconnected from the past? I say no.
Oddly, I say yes!
In fact, we could probably say that’s pretty much the goal of any meditative practice, couldn’t we, to learn to be awareness that watches thoughts? The past is just a memory, a thought. Even more oddly, thoughts occur only in the present. That pretty much knocks the pins out from under a whole lotta bullshit.
Thoughts occur only in the present, true enough, but I interpret our debate as being about the content of thought, not when it occurs. Otherwise there really is no debate. (Maybe there isn’t, at some level.)
Here’s what I at least advocate: free-ranging uninhibited reflection on one’s whole experience of life, most of which was in the past. I want to pack this little nutshell of a brain as full as possible of everything there is to think about that life and the lives of everyone else I can learn about. The goal of such thinking, I grant, is to find understanding and possibly even happiness in the present. But I don’t think you get there by throwing out most of the contents of the nutshell. I must say, John, that as a reader of your writings I find lots in the nutshell, so it always puzzles me when you advocate emptiness. Take the past out of your writings, especially the beautiful ones about your sister, and what would remain?
But I never advocate “emptiness”!
At least not in the way you mean it. Of course I draw on memory when I write.
When it comes to happiness and being in the moment, however, emptiness is relevant, especially for someone whose psyche is rutted by Buckboards of Mass Destruction. The point is all about changing behavior, and it does work.
I agree with Ken on this one, although I do see your point.
I’ve tried for a number of years to get my old friend Ken to see that “objective reality” (including memories, thoughts, etc.) arises from and floats on a sea of undifferentiated consciousness/spiritual energy/whatever… but short of strapping him down and force-feeding him LSD, mushrooms, or arranging a direct injection of Energy like the “come to God” moment Paul had on the road to Damascus, it ain’t gonna work. He’s a Western civilization traditionalist and proud of it! I love him for that, actually—I mean, whatcha gonna do?
My sister’s passing aside—although THAT’S THE POINT OF THIS POST!(ahem)—my personal quest in all of this is emotional/spiritual healing, and there’s been much progress.
For the psychologically inclined, what I mean is that there is indeed a difference between the abuse unconsciously dumped on us and the inner structures, patterns, even entitities created in our psyches as a result… The demons (complexes) will trap you, absent understanding of their origins, but for me at least, I couldn’t even SEE them without re-experiencing the shut-away agony of the original abuse! That’s why most of us never “go there.”
When you get all the way to the bottom, there’s a miracle of sorts: “I” am not the memories OR the complexes, but something else entirely. From this “place” (sea, above) we watch emotions come and go and find that intention changes everything. Teresa knew this, consciously or unconsciously, or else she never would have been able to live her own truth the way she did.
I can sign on to those last two paragraphs, old compadre. Changing one’s conduct so as to be a somewhat better person – within the many limitations our lives impose on us – may indeed mean struggling against elements of one’s past. I never think of the past as a better, less confusing, less tormented place than the present. I haven’t got much use for sentimentalizing depictions of it or anything else. See all things without illusion, with clear eyes: That’s my faith and my church. If that makes me some kind of half-dead European-centric traditionalist, I can’t help it and don’t want to help it.
Still and all, I wouldn’t mind undergoing one of those New Mexico waterboardings you’re threatening me with (hit me with them hallucinogens!), but I’m afraid I’d disappoint you: I don’t have it in me to sing out Hallelujah under even the derangement of extreme ecstasy. The closest I’ve ever gotten to seeing the light was when I figured out (at about the time sex erupted in my consciousness) that life was going to be different and more interesting than advertised in church or the movies.
Thank you for taking my weirdness in good spirits. You’re in no danger from hallucinogenic waterboarding, either, as those delights are largely in my ancient past. But I won’t lie: they made a difference, especially when it comes to understanding Nature.
I’m half-dead too, just not “European-centric.”
one of my sisters died in 2000. it was a sudden and unexpected passing, in terms of WHEN it happened, but she had longterm health issues so that we all knew instinctively that the phone call at night would be about her, not my parents….
she and i were eleven months apart. it was wrenching to lose her. but i’m numb still, all these years later, taking the pollyana approach to her death, saying to myself she’s gone on as we all will and merged into her next adventure, whatever life becomes when it leaves here
and so i feel it is with teresa, another beautiful soul who has taken flight