Foliage time is here, and the many visitors who come to see the leaves turn are beginning to show up. Peak foliage season has come to Northern Vermont and is coming to this area in the next week or so. There are all sort of reasons to live elsewhere but this is a great reason to live here. This never gets tiresome and trumpets a new season with glory and color.
For the first time in her very healthy life, Lenore got a cortisone shot to knock out three days and nights of non-stop itching, she has been so uncomfortable. Dr. Suzanne Fariello of the Cambridge Valley Veterinary Service said she is seeing waves of dogs coming in for inhalant allergies as the climate gets warmer, the frosts come later and are not as hard. Ticks and fleas are not dying off and pollens and other allergies are on the increase as many kinds of plants and growth simply do not die.
Lenore is one of the best bred and healthiest dogs I have ever had, and she’s never had any kind of allergy before this year (I think she did have a brief bout of itching in the Spring). A few hours after the shot, the itching stopped and she is just about back to normal. Lenore loves the techs and doctors at the clinic, she gets a bit anxious while she gets a shot, but her tail never stops thumping.
Last night, I met Walter White, I watched the final episode of “Breaking Bad.” I am familiar with the story line I’ve seen some videos from previous shows. I have come to see in recent years – doctors have helped me with this – to accept that I have the gift of autism, it is perhaps the source of my creative drive. I cannot imagine watching five years worth of “Breaking Bad.” I could never spend an evening doing that, I would jump right out of my skin. I am good at absorbing things quickly, and I loved the idea of coming to this series fresh, with a clean perspective.
I was trying to explain this to my daughter last night, who disapproved so much of my approach to watching a series that she refused to recommend any good cable shows unless I promised to download them all on Netflix and watch them from the beginning. Maria and I have not had a TV these past few years, we just got a small 22″ Samsung a month ago, and we are sniffing around carefully, watching an occasional movie on weekends.
But when something strikes as deep a chord as this series did, I want to see it, feel it, get a sense of it. I love popular culture, it is important to me to understand it, not flee from it, Walter White’s story has been whispering to me for months, online, in conversations, in snippets of things I see and read. I think many more people in America were thinking of Walter White this morning than Ted Cruz or Harry Reid.
This story was about real life, Washington is about life on the moon.
Maria does not share this particular curiosity, she went upstairs with Frieda to read the new Alice Hoffman novel, I sat with Red and Lenore, and feel into a trance watching this brilliant production. I loved this episode, I am very much struck by this Chekhov, or perhaps Shakespearean drama. Water White reminds me of many of the great and enduring myth narratives, from Dracula to Batman – the divided man, part good, part monster, struggling for his soul in a brutal and often disconnected world. This is an old story brought into a new time, a tale of metamorphosis and myth – the chemistry teacher is stricken with cancer, vanishes to become a brilliant and ruthless drug kingpin, ostensibly to provide for his family, all of whom come to hate and reject him, and thus the loving and good man becomes the monster.
I did not really need a score of episodes to get the drift, I got it right away, and loved it right away, was transfixed by it. This is a story that reflects all of us, I think, we all struggle with our good and bad selves, just on a lesser scale, and without such gifted screen writers and directors. I think this is the story we all carry in our minds about ourselves, the great mystery of human beings, their capacity for great good and horrendous evil. Who has not struggled with the good and the bad inside of us?
In our culture, there is great pressure to appear to be perfect, people do not show their divided selves, Walter White actually came to find peace in his final days. He began as a family man, and ended as a family men, that thread seem to transcend his metamorphosis from good to evil. I started rooting for him from the first minute, and was rooting for him still at the end. In his own way, he was truer to himself than most of the people I have known in my life. He was desperate to leave his family secure and intact, it was never far from his mind. It is something we all desperately want, something many of us cannot have or offer.
I understand that people will be upset with me for not plunging into the pond head first and following the series from the beginning. We all have our ways of doing things, mine works for me.
Towards the end, White manages to sneak into his once happy home to say goodbye to his wife and get a last look at his sleeping young daughter – another very piercing moment. Susan warns him not to claim that he turned to evil for the good of his family, that he did it all for them. In a moment of almost Biblical authenticity, this man turned devil says “I did it for me. I liked it. I was alive.” He got me right there, that was great writing in our time of faux sensitivity and public posturing, the monster is able to be more honest than the congressman or the priest.
The show stirred me up creatively, after it was over I read Julian Barnes very powerful new book, an exploration of photography, ballooning and grief, “Levels Of Life,” and then I went to the computer to blog about grief and grieving.
I looked in my big Apple monitor, and I saw Walter White’s reflection staring right back at me. He was in my head and is there still. I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight, and I can’t say much more about any story than that.
Sunday, I had two different kinds of encounters with grief. The first came at the new Northshire Bookstore opening in Saratoga Springs when a woman asked me to sign two copies of “Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die,” my book on grieving for animals.
Some time ago, this woman said, she had lost a cat who had lived to be 14. Something about her put me off, I sensed she wanted something personal from me, after all these years of signings, I can tell. And I understood what she wanted, as she pulled a photo album out of her purse and began to tell me the story of the cat, how much she loved her, how much the animal meant to her, how sick she was, how sad she was every single day, and she began showing me her photos of the cat’s life and death.
There was a line behind her, and the store representatives were getting anxious, and I understood what she was asking me, I have experienced this so many times before when some people want so much more than a book signed, they don’t care if others are waiting, it is a common occurrence in bookstore lines, every writer knows it. She wanted me to know her grief, to listen to it and share it.
After four or five minutes, she seemed to me to be getting less coherent, and pulled out more writings, diary entries and photos, and I very courteously told her there were people behind her, and I wished her good luck. Later, she came over to Maria and complained that I was not sympathetic enough to her, she guessed it was because I am more of a dog person than a cat person. Maria talked to her for a while longer, and then she drifted off, and came back in the line one more time.
Maria and I talked about it later, and I told her I simply could not give this woman what she wanted, she seemed so lost in this cloud of grief, she seemed unable to let it go, she seemed to me to have lost all perspective, andI felt as if she was pulling me inside of this black space and I just could not go there. When this happens to me, I tell myself to put it in the cup, there is a cup between me and people who want to dump their stuff on me, and I put it in the cup rather than take it inside of me.
Maria understood – she has seen this so many times – but I sensed she was more sympathetic to the poor woman than I was, she has never lost the precious gift of empathy. I have not learned this new idea of sharing my grief with other people, with strangers, not in bookstore lines, not on Facebook. This woman felt inappropriate, stuck in an awful place – this kind of prolonged and intense grieving is rarely about a dog or cat. I was thinking she needed professional help, not a writer in a bookstore line. it had just gone on for too long.
I was not yet done with grief on Sunday. At the store, I bought a book by Julian Barnes called “Levels Of Life,” (Knopf) and the book is a surprising, beautifully written and poignant work on ballooning, photography, love and loss – the last third is about the sudden death of his wife after 30 years of marriage. The book is wonderful, it combines fiction, history and memoir in one compact and wonderfully rendered volume. In the last part, I was literally blindsided by Barne’s very quiet and piercing devastation.
Barnes essentially is writing about what it means to be alive in the world, what it means to live, love and die and to suffer profound loss. This is one of the very few universal human experiences. Barnes is “griefstruck” and he captures the experience of grief with great feeling, detail, and command of language. It is a wonderful book for anyone who has dealt or will deal with grief – this is all of us. I thought of Barnes last night and of the woman in the bookstore – two different ends of the grieving experience, and it seemed to me they were both feeling much of the same thing, for very different reasons and coming from very different places. This woman was still devastated by the loss of her cat, and even though I had gotten impatient with her, her sense of grief was just as powerful as Barnes.
It was perhaps more comfortable for me to read about the grief Barnes experienced in my favorite living room reading chair, Barnes was offering his story for me to read, he wasn’t pushing a photo album of his dead wife at me. Was the distance the difference for me? At home, Red and Lenore were at my feet, my was wife asleep up in the bedroom, I cannot really even imagine how I might deal with the loss of her, but “Levels Of Life” got me to thinking about it, imagining it, picturing my reactions. I got me to crying downstairs in the dark just thinking about it – these tears brought Frieda, Lenore and Red all to my side at the same time, they seemed so concerned they quickly turned my tears to laughter.
I know in my hospice work that grief goes it’s own way, takes it’s own path, no two people grieve in the same way. No one ever knows how they will react to such loss, how painful it might be, how long it might last. I could never tell anyone to grieve, yet I felt very close to Barnes’s struggle with loss and understanding and acceptance of what it means to be alive in the world. He was observant, not complaining, he was sharing insight, not seeking sympathy. “We did not make the clouds come in the first place,” he writes, “we have no power to disperse them.”
The gift of the writer is that he or she can often find the words to pull them through the darkest clouds of life – my words have often pulled me through the deepest darkness – and the elderly woman in the bookstore could not. I could not give her what she wanted from me, I cannot take someone else’s grief nor give them mine. I keep the cup with me at all times. In the animal world and the human one, we did not creature the nature of life and death, we have no power to alter one or the other, to make one appear and the other go away.
