A few years ago, I felt almost
certain that I would be the one to find the body of my grandmother, Ruth Agnes
McKinney. My imagination varied the circumstances of my finding her – in her
garden, mostly through with her weeding; reclining in a chair, a blanket sewn
by her hands tucked around her waist, a book in her lap; sitting at a table,
post-breakfast, a crossword nearly complete beneath an open hand. Always, I would find her and fall to my
knees, hug her body and weep. Always, I would pick her up and bring her to her
bed. And then, always, I would make the call, the one informing the family that
Maga had died.
We called her Meme when I was a
little boy, like a child declaring who gets the candy. The summers and
vacations of my adolescence more often than not were spent at my grandparent’s
ranch in New Mexico. At Meme and Pape’s place, we would fish, hunt for
arrowheads, help with the animals, play jungle golf, build forts, climb in the
mountains. Mostly, though, we would eat, because Meme would insist. Three or
four times a day, she would insist, so I ate a lot of Vienna sausages and
canned raviolis back then, and drank a lot of cow’s milk.
She is Maga now, the name coined by
a more recent addition to the family. Still, she remains Meme all the same,
loving and kind, still trying to feed everyone. I no longer have any thought
about finding her, of making that dreaded call to the family. Today, it is
certain that I will be on the receiving end of such a call.
Korea had been a ball. Two years of teaching, bartending and travelling, but the time had come to return to the States, to finish my degree, to see old friends and family. I made a stop in Seattle, where my brother and sister-in-law lived at the time. It was the day of Michael Jordan’s retirement – the first one. That same weekend, my brother Jay (a sonar tech for the U.S. Navy) surprised me with a rented boat, a fishing pole longer and thicker than any I had ever used before, and a water-proof coat. It was ungodly a.m., still dark a.m., and I was jet-lagged and a little hung over, but I mustered the strength to get out of bed and dress myself.
By eight, we were motoring our way through the dense, thick fog which blanketed Puget Sound. Only shades of gray existed, extending a few feet past the edge of the boat. Beyond that was a vaguely shifting white punctuated sporadically by more concentrated circles of light. Sounds were limited to the chunking of the little motor bolted to the back of the boat and what seemed at the time to be the occasional sigh of a lonely, enormous and somewhat distant tuba player.
By nine, we no longer had to worry about the motor, as we had managed to pass over a partially submerged log, which floated inexplicably just below the surface of the water. The log and the motor, star-crossed, met, the motor leapt, let go of the boat, and spun in lazy circles to the bottom of the Sound. I am unsure whether the helix of its voyage widened gradually or reduced itself to a line, though I still sometimes try to imagine it.
Hours and several hundred dollars later, we pulled in at Jay’s home. Becky asked where the fish were, and, figuring that Jay might have some explaining to do, I opted to return to bed. As I walked away, he said to me, “We’ll try again tomorrow.” I just looked at him, grinned. Shit, too, brother of mine.
I convinced him to take me someplace else, and we ended up at another of his favorite places, ‘The Steps’. It was a structure that had been built on the edge of a river I have since forgotten the name of, built into the ground and glass-walled to allow visitors to see what life beneath the surface of the water was like. Jay told me that the salmon were running, making their way upstream, back to the spawning grounds. I didn’t really care at the time, and thought I would be bored. Salmon swim upstream sometimes, have some unstoppable need to breed where they were bred. Didn’t everyone know that? I knew that, had known since I was a child craving Vienna sausage and raviolis. I had even seen the films of salmon struggling against the current and gravity, leaping mightily into the open mouths of patient bears. I always rooted for the bears, warm-blooded and hairy, but they were conspicuously absent from this scene.
But hearing is not seeing, and knowing some thing as a piece of trivia is no substitute for experience. The salmon were amazing, their struggle awe inspiring and beautiful. Their determination to swim upstream reduces my most concentrated efforts to whim, makes the most drastic New Year’s resolution appear a simple matter of biology and bodily function, as simple as urination. Scores of fish, fist- to schoolyard bully-sized, nosed through the opposing current, waited with utmost poise and patience. Unblinking, they looked like fixated Zen masters. They leapt, many not making the jump, only to crash, fish-nose to stone, tumble back, right themselves and wait to try again. Occasionally a salmon would dislodge a rock, sending it tumbling down, compelled by gravity as the fish are by instinct.
The length of the building allowed viewers to watch only a few such leaps, well under a dozen, and I watched as people would pick a salmon and cheer it on, wish ill on the fish picked by a companion, or track a favorite the whole way up until it was lost. How many leaps had been made before? How many were yet to come?
The writing goes slowly. The path is muddied, I think, with the residue of taboo. My grandmother, Ruth, Meme, Maga, is still alive. At 81 years old, she is still healthy and active, her mind sharp, her tongue sharper. She shops, baby-sits the grandkids, cooks a lot of meals. She is happy, I think. I have imagined her death, however; imagined it, sculpted whole novellas from the fiction of her demise, experienced the cultivated dread of being the bearer of bad news. And now I have written about it, and shared it with others. I am unsure where I crossed the line, but I have. I have entered the territory of the sacred, and uttered blasphemies.
Maga will indeed die one day, most likely before me, my brothers, cousins, parents. Barring an accident, she is next. She knows this, has spoken to me about it. She appears comfortable talking about her death where I cannot even pretend to be while in her company. A few years ago, she too thought it likely that I might be the one who finds her body, who must make the call. Once, she asked me what I would do, how I might react to the event. I wasn’t sure, I said. We both know now that I will not be making that call, that I will instead receive it from someone else. We have not discussed the subject since.
Maga was born in 1919, in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Born, raised, educated there, living in a log cabin on the side of a 14,000-foot mountain, she grew food for her family, hunted with her brothers and dad. At eight years, she was responsible for rising before the sun and carrying coal and wood to a one-room schoolhouse. Grown, she met Howard Joseph McKinney, a local boy who had been stood up for a church dance. She begged out of babysitting that night so that she could be his date, and, a year later, they married.
Together, they left the San Luis Valley and moved to Pueblo, Colorado, and started a family that would someday include me. When their children were largely grown and gone, they bought a place in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, the ranch I remember so well from my childhood. Twenty years later, my grandfather sick with alcoholism and cancer, Meme and Pape returned to Pueblo, to be near the family. Pape died about a year later and Meme, who is Maga now, has remained in Pueblo since. It has not always been a willing stay.
Shortly after my grandfather died, some of the mountain on which my grandmother had grown up became available to buy. My father joined Maga in purchasing 15 acres of land with the intent of building a cabin. The building would be constructed as money permitted, which meant over a period of years. The land was ideal, sitting only a few dozen yards above Urraca cemetery, a landmark dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, where many of my ancestors lie. Maga has a plot and headstone situated parallel to and against that of my grandfather. I have neither plot nor stone, but am frequently reminded that I should at least pick my spot before all the good ones are taken. In the years since the purchase, Maga and my father have indeed built a cabin on the mountain. A very special cabin, metaphorically upstream from my grandmother.
The first room of the cabin was moved whole, on the back of a flatbed, and situated on a foundation of new concrete. The room, now repaired and water-proofed, is the one-room school house which Maga made warm many years ago. It is the same room in which she was born, the logs having witnessed several births and not a few deaths. A year later, the large, central portion of the cabin was built from logs removed from the old King ranch, the very home Maga grew up in. A third room, still incomplete, is built on a floor of slated wood, the dance floor of the small church where Ruth King and Howard McKinney first danced, first kissed (I have been told these two events did not occur on the same night). West to east, bottom to top, the cabin gets newer, a tangible time-line of Maga’s life.
The time had come to leave again, this time to leave
Seattle and return home to Pueblo. I spent the last few days avoiding Jay and
any discussion of boats or fishing, and focused on teaching my nephew to catch
a baseball instead.
JD and I stood outside, beneath a cottony sun, and
tossed the ball back and forth. I wore my brother’s old, worn Wilson glove with
mock Doc Gooden signature, he wore a vinyl-looking kids glove, bright blue and
green. No strings, no sweet-pocket to snap and cradle the ball in, the glove
fit his hand like a pastel Andy Warhol-designed cast. But JD was full of
six-year-old joy at playing with his uncle, learning to do something he had
watched a thousand times in his life on TV, in the school yard and on his
block. The glove was fine with him.
At the start, throws outnumbered catches about three
to one. Either I would toss it, floating the ball in an easy arch, and he would
fumble it or miss it altogether, or he would hurl it past me, over me, by me,
and I would end up sprinting down the hill their house was on to retrieve the
ball. Gradually, his throws tightened up, became directed more-or-less in my
vicinity, and I made more catches and saves. JD became less afraid of being hit
by the ball (I explained to him that catching the ball avoids being hit by the
ball much more often than trying to get out of the ball’s way), and better able
to judge from watching the ball where it would land.
My nephew is long-limbed and thin (his mother would
call him lanky), and it took him some time to develop all of the skills and
coordinations necessary to play catch with me. After an hour or so, he turned
into a fine six-year-old player of catch, and I turned into the sweaty and
tired epitome of an out-of-shape adult. His development fascinated me though,
so I kept tossing and sweating, watching him get better by degrees.
At first, the path the ball took as it left my hand
and traveled through the air must have appeared to JD to be nearly random and
haphazard. When I let go of the ball, he had no idea where it would end up. I
noticed that his eyes never left me until the ball had landed near him,
re-entering his field of view, and then his eyes would widen slightly and dart
to the ball. He would pick it up, place it experimentally in his plastic glove
and throw it back in my direction, where I would chase it, run back, and toss
it again. I started to toss the ball with less of an arch so that, as it rose
and then fell toward JD, it would not leave his field of view. His eyes stayed
on the ball. My next task was to convince him that the ball wasn’t going to
‘get him.’
JD gradually developed a sense of where the ball was
going to land, and started to position his body and his glove for the catch. He
would watch the ball rise, reach its peak, and judge where it was coming down,
where it had to come down.
If it were not for things such as hands and gloves,
grass, dirt and rocks, the ball would continue falling, following its decreed
path to the center of the earth. Gravity summons. Balls obey. This insight
helped to turn my nephew into a competent catch partner.
When I became too tired to play anymore, I grabbed a
beer from the kitchen and sat on the porch, watching JD try to master the fine
art of tossing the ball up and catching it himself.
When I finally arrived in Pueblo, it was to a fair
amount of family controversy. The cabin on Maga’s mountain was nearing
completion: the plumbing and wiring had been done, an electric generator was
installed, the kitchen outfitted. The cabin became a potentially comfortable
home. Not so long before, the cabin had been base camp for hunting trips, but
afforded little more comfort than a good tent. A bigger heater, larger cooking
space, and one person actually got to sleep on a bed, but that was about the
difference. While I was in Seattle visiting my brother and his family, Maga
decided that she would move to the mountain and live in the cabin. She made
plans for a garden and a clothesline, accumulated dozens of Ball jars for
storage and canning. Maga desired to return to her home, to perhaps end life
where and as she began it.
For me, the cabin had served as a refuge from school,
family, ex-girlfriends. When it was one room, I would sit with my chocolate
labrador Jarvis and study Kant and Beowulf, Greek mythology and physics. I
cooked on a propane grill and drank bottled water. In the daytime, I would take
long walks into the mountains, taking a field guide to the flora and fauna of
the San Luis Valley, a fishing pole or just a paper and pen. My most treasured
and productive time was cabin-time, and it had been more than a year since I
had driven south, through Walsenburg to Fort Garland, to Blanca and nine miles
straight as light down the Great Sand Dunes Road, and up to the cabin. I
resolved that I would reacquaint myself soon, and return often.
The family protested Maga’s decision to live in the
cabin, fearing that she would be too isolated and alone. What if she fell? And
there are lions and bears on the mountain. What if there was a fire, a
blizzard, a freak flood? She wanted to go; there were some of us in the family
who supported her, who thought that she had earned the right to live where and
how she pleased, to possibly die, if not how, then where she wanted to die. We
talked, not often but openly, of the possibility the she might go and live on
the mountain, and yes, might die there. How, she asked, did I feel about her
moving, knowing that I might arrive one day and find her, my grandmother, dead?
What would I do?
Gravity pulls. Electricity binds. The flesh desires.
There are degrees of desire, gradations of need and must. Salmon, as far as I
am aware, are incapable of saying no, their compulsions hardwired into their
essence, an integral aspect of salmonhood. A rock, a leaf, a body, all always
eventually say yes to gravity. But some
compulsions can be resisted.
The family collectively decided and made it known that
they did not support Maga’s living on the mountain. Maga gave in and lives near
her son and her daughters in Pueblo. Utilitarianism informed her decision. She
did not want to cause the family so much worry and anxiety for her sake, and
she opted to stay.
In sense, I feel like I understand the drive which
compels a salmon upstream, despite the seemingly insurmountable barriers of
nature, matter water and teeth. With some numbers, some tools and some thought,
I could predict with relative accuracy the effects gravity would have on a rock
dislodged by the tail of a leaping fish or a ball thrown skyward by a little
boy. The attracting force remains mysterious at its core, but thinkable and
manageable in our lived experience. What then is the source of Maga’s
compulsion, her desire to return to the place of her birth?
The stories of our lives, I think, compel us, the narratives that provide the structure and depth of our selves. We are not simply the sum of our experience, and experience is not the total of a life, but rather experience and identity are joined asymptotically, never equaling each other, never too far apart. I think that perhaps the meaningful events which constitute a lifetime, clustered like stars at moments in time, act as beacons as life’s end seems that it might come sooner rather than later. Origin is not the desired destination of Maga, but rather the syzygy of significant events which shaped her and draws her as the center does a stone, the breathy wisps of the past converging to form a subjective center of gravity. First dance, first kiss. Weddings and funerals. Friends best forgotten or fondly remembered. Innumerable experiences and memories are the heart of Maga’s desired return, a desire irreducible to biology or physics or any single cause. Neither fish nor fall, Maga lives as an extension of her experience, a sentient stone the mountain hurled one day into the world, patiently waiting to receive her again.