"How beautiful, this night in June!
And here, upon the velvet dune,
I weep with joy beneath the moon." from Ballade to the Moon by Daniel Elder
For the past week I have enjoyed a thought, more like a waking dream. As the thought has grown in my psyche, so has my joy.
I had not felt joy in several days. Over the last several weeks my wife and I have experienced a bizarre series of losses that have sapped our good feelings with each successive loss. Thankfully, none of these losses involves a death. And I apologize in advance to you if you have lost someone you love permanently. In that case, our losses don't even rate. But they feel like they rate on some significant scale.The last loss of four occurred just last Monday. We went together to see my counselor of twenty six years to gain some level of comfort in our collective pain. He always has the right words. He always has the right amount of care and kindness. After we told him of the most significant loss, he said, "You're grieving. You're going to have to let the process play itself out." Then he dropped the bombshell. "And you need to know that I'm retiring." Twenty six years of being heard. Of being known. Of being understood. "I'm retiring in October."
These brambles were not important to me at the time. They were just something I could see out the back windows of our beach house. Something that kept me from walking across the back yard. They grew right up to the back of our house and grew across the way to the next house. These brambles, for lack of a better word, were very thick. They were not only thick in consistency, but the stems themselves were very thick. These scrubs were about four feet tall and had a fairly level top. like they had been pruned. They were like thorns gone crazy. I would like to tell you that they were thick with thorns, but I don't know for sure. I never got close enough to see. As many times as I saw them, I never actually looked at them. There was nothing particularly interesting about them to get my attention.
But this week I've been thinking about them. Several days ago the brambles came to me in a waking thought and the thought brought to me a strange joy. I have no idea why these scrubs would make me feel good to think about them, but they do. Well actually I do have an idea. Although I wasn't aware of them at the time, maybe they were aware of me. Maybe they watched me through the window gleefully reading comic books on the big double bed. Superman.. Batman. Spider man and more. They heard with me the wonk wonk of the big black ceiling fan above my head. They saw the pink skin on my arms, neck and face from the morning swim under the blazing Florida sun. They witnessed the adult-enforced nap to give my siblings, cousins and me much needed rest and themselves a break before accompanying our running and stumbling back down the dunes to the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico.
After being in the family over forty years, the family beach house has long since belonged to someone else. Any thought of it usually renews that grief, that immense loss. But not this time. These brambles have restored to me a level of happiness. A level of joy. It's like for the first time in several weeks I can see through the fog of personal pain to better times, to better feelings. Maybe they're even telling me that all those words from twenty six years in that same room won't be forgotten. That twenty six years of knotty convolutions of words and phrases will live on in my head and in my heart. That I may forget the words, but that they won't forget me. Like thorns, they stick.
After I recovered from the shock, I told my counselor, my advocate that I wasn't too upset about his leaving because I knew he would give me his phone number. And to my surprise, he smiled and said, "Of course I will."
February 2019. Me: "Jim, this is David." Jim:"Why am I not surprised."
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