Accidents

We were driving to the only really nice restaurant in St John USVI, around sunset. St John is mostly a national park, and the roads are mostly dark and windy and narrow. You're best off renting a jeep, if you visit. One stretch of cliffhanger passes above the little shack where Robert Oppenheimer passed his last days. It belongs to the people of St John now, and apparently a good number of them had just finished a loud party there (I know, because we'd tried to snorkel the bay in front of the shack earlier, and the music was so loud the fish had fled the coral). As we passed the exit a busload of kids flew past us, showering us with frozen drinks. Followed by cars, jeeps and pickup trucks full of overly cheerful folks barely navigating the barely two-lane road, its left shoulder the mountain, its right the cliffs overlooking Gibney Beach. If you look at the photo in this last link you can see the cut in the trees made by this little road.

We lost our sense of humor about their careening escapades at about the fourth hairpin turn, when a red pickup truck passed us, forcing Mr. Nomist to a near stop in the middle of traffic, followed by a leapfrogging little white jeep.

I've been a little leery of my stepdaughter's, um, focus skills, especially now that she's old enough to drive. Wanting to make sure she understands how dangerous driving can be, and how to drive defensively, I turned to both our teenagers and said, "This is the time when you need to slow down and let the other drivers get ahead of you as much as they want, because they're about to cause an accident."

My son agreed. He mentioned a previous incident we'd seen on a highway in Vermont that had ended with the driver being ticketed. The jeep and the truck were playing the same game, a weaving race through traffic, only this time it was dark, and there weren't many places to dodge.

By the time I turned back around, the little white jeep had gone over the cliff and gotten caught in a tree. She'd hit another car, bounced across oncoming traffic, and flipped sideways, fortunately stopped by a dense stand of trees. All the former party goers were now standing in (and blocking) the road, staring at the wreck, doing nothing. Or doing things, just in that unbearably slow post-wreck time speed that feels like nothing.

My husband, knowing me, tells me over and over, don't get out of the car, don't get out of the car. At first I listen, trying to accept his logic. Then I realize everyone else out on the street is at least half drunk or injured in the wreck. There is no cop, no ambulance. No lucky doctor in the crowd, just me with first aid training. So my hand opens the door and I hop out in my nice dress and over to the embankment.

She's young, slender, wide eyed, standing next to her rotated car, her arms folded over her pristine white and gold Cleopatra pantsuit. She's fine. Just a little chilly. "Is there anyone else in the car?" I ask her. No. "Do you want help getting out?" No. I take that to mean, not from me, anyway, and it's all I need to hear. I get back in the car.

I turn to my stepdaughter. "You notice how we all saw what those drivers were doing, and said to back off because they were going to cause an accident?"

"No," she said, "I wasn't paying attention."

Negotiating the ineffable.

On my way to work I still pass the park and think of Jesse. It's painful, but I do it anyway. I can't fully explain why. At any rate, it occurred to me today that it's not him, not the loss of him that keeps beckoning me toward the abyss. It's something else, something terrible; his image is only a lure. Whatever he may have wished for me in his short life, it's not that.

Later, after mentioning this to a friend, I remembered something else, a little takeaway from Freud and the Tibetan Bhuddists. Freud says that the elements of your dreams are all you. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says that all the monstrous deities you battle after death, are illusions, that these are really battles with yourself. The abyss then, is not only within me. It is me. I am this abyss.

And this is what I must navigate in order to pass onward.

This corny song I wrote for Jesse.

I hate these corny songs
That make everybody cry
So I don’t have any excuse for this one
Honey,
It’s just been so hard
since you’ve been gone--

So I try to see you near me
I try to feel you near me
I try to know you’re near me
I try to see you everywhere.

I was walking in the park
Last night and everywhere I looked
I saw a little bit of you
In every face that passed me by

I saw the children you could have had
I saw the child that you once were
I saw the father you’d have been
I saw you old, and slow and grey

And I could feel you near me
I could see you near me
I could hear you near me
And I
Saw you everywhere.

I went off the pills
And in my head I heard this song
And there’s so much I want to say
And hear from you, I’ll never hear you

But I
feel you near me
I feel you near me
And I
I see you everywhere.

I want to tell you
about your brother and your friends
They’re all doing well
And when I see them it’s a little gift
A gift from you, a bit of you.

That’s when we feel you near us
We feel you near us
And we
See you everywhere.

This last verse is hard
Too much like saying goodbye again
Feeling your heart stop
Under my hand
again.

So I'll pretend you're near me
I'll pretend I hear you
I'll pretend you're near me
And I'll see you everywhere.

We’ve lost another family member this week: Mr. Nomist's uncle passed away. He’s in Austin now with his cousins and aunt. They’re doing as can be expected. Uncle Kenny served in the Navy in World War II, then worked as one of the investigators during the Nuremberg trials. During his time there he adopted two German children from Nuremberg orphanages, brought them home and raised them to be good ol Texans. At any given family gathering you'd see Kenny in his tam o'shanter, a bagpiper in a kilt, and the rest of us circling with 'gars, beers, single malt, chili and queso. There were never many like Kenny, and the world is a smaller place without him.



Father's Day 2008

I found a picture of my father
from 1968
the year before he pulled over the car with all of us in it
on the side of the road somewhere in Michigan in July
the first VACANT sign he could find
he rented a room and piled us in, all five of us and two beds but most important a tv affixed to the wall above the cheap dresser so we could see
the giant leap for mankind.

In the photo he is thirty five; gazing into the soul of the lens as if he knew its depths
he didn't know
In eleven years he'd be dead
with me by his side begging him not to.

For Fathers' day I went out and bought a frame for that photo, black with a white matte, now he gazes at me with that same concentration, amused, disappointed a little, curious even now that he may have missed something deep in there. At nine o'clock
I watched two hours of NASA footage
Moon launches and landings like we never could have seen, from NASA's vault, my father's dream of a perfect Sunday night with us.
Astronauts and engineers together through life and fear and death and failure. And victory. And always a new abyss beyond that now plumbed.

Who could look away from Neil Armstrong, except to see my father transfixed as we were. Except to see the moon had not changed for the men now on it? Now, my father said, there really is a man in the moon.