Honeysuckles

I will be happy to observe my birthday next month if February doesn’t do me in.  This has been an unusually cold winter.  Thirty degrees and overcast this afternoon, too cold for February, too cold for me.  This is the South, even if it is North Carolina.  I’m sure that age has something to do with it.  Young people are out lightly dressed showing no sign of discomfort.  I remember my annual winter goal, make it till honeysuckles, spring, and greens up again. 

It’s not only me that’s cold and gray on days such as these.  I saw a guy standing at an intersection with sign that read ‘Veteran needs help,’ his collar up against a wind.  Before the night is out he will be colder still.  Gordon Lightfoot has a song about that guy, ‘Home From the Forest.’

         His ragged coat around him

         As upon his cot he lay

         And he wondered how it happened

         That he ended up this way

         Getting lost like a fool

         In the forest….

How did it happen?  Drugs or mental illness are the usual and I guess correct answers.  Or just random chance, foolish mistakes that tumbled out of control?  It is commonplace to observe that problems such as these are less binary and more points on a gradient.  We are all somewhere on that line.  Where on that sliding scale is the point where a person slips into irrevocable despair? 

Perhaps everything is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, that systems tend always to evolve toward disorder unless continual effort is made to maintain order.  Most of us can put in the work to do that.  But for all systems, there is a tipping point between order and chaos, criticality, where small events can multiply and tumble out of control.  Most have help, family, community, things we have created to give comfort and keep the chaos at bay. 

Until they don’t.  Until in the midst of a quiet dusk a round comes burning in across the wire, unheard, faster than the rifle’s report.  Is that what happened to the guy at the intersection, to Lightfoot’s old forgotten soldier, or was it the result of slow decay, the steady accumulation of toxins?  The sense, feeling that we are on thin ice, that we must be ever mindful is always in the background.  ‘Behind the innocent trees, old doom is silently waiting.’  Things can fall apart, often unexpectedly.  The famous line from Hemmingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’ applies to a good deal more than money. How did you become bankrupt, the character Mike Campbell was asked.  “Two ways,” Mike said, “Gradually and then suddenly.”

We are sometimes like a car with a front end slightly out of alignment, pulling to the right, into the trees.  Light touch of the wheel, though, and back on the road.  And then, sitting in a Burger King outside Fayetteville, drinking a cup of coffee, killing time waiting to pick up a boat being serviced, a young woman comes in.  Her hair looks like brightly colored cotton candy, blue and red and green, her eye shadow, a lot of eye shadow, looked like soot rubbed on with her thumb.  She carried a back pack and a stuffed black plastic garbage bag.  Did that mean what it looked like?  I watched her, wondering if she would order a meal or something less.  If something less should I offer to buy her something to eat?  Would that be taken as an insult?  Or a pickup line?  Happily, she ordered what appeared to be a burger, fries, and a drink.  I am relieved of needing to act, or not.  She leaves, walking to a gas station alongside the highway and I lose sight of her.  Trying to catch a ride.

In the novel ‘As I Lay Dying’ Cash Burden was careful to sharpen, clean, and put carefully away the saw, adze, drawing knife, and other tools that each day he used to build a coffin for his mother as she lay dying in the house.  Those tools were what he had, all he had, to maintain order and some control in that disordered, haphazard family, his shield to keep old doom at bay.  And then they were lost when the wagon in which he was traveling overturned trying to ford a river at flood.  Cash would have known better.  It was foolish mistake, his father’s mistake, but Old Man Anse Burden was in all his ways a fool. 

Two days after the cup of coffee in a Burger King and the girl with cotton candy hair I am driving down to Georgia to pick up Martha following a visit with friends and family.  I left the house at 5 AM.  About six hours later coming up on Wrens, Georgia I stop alongside the road to get something out of the back seat.  It is a sunny day but surprisingly cool as I stepped out and opened the rear door when suddenly my left arm when numb.  I was lightheaded.  I took it as serious and got back in the front seat, moving my arm to try and get some feeling back.  The symptoms lasted three or four minutes.  I drove through Wrens looking for a blue hospital sign.  Nothing.  On the outskirts of town a couple of guys were getting out of a truck in front of a hardware and I pulled over to ask about the nearest hospital.  Nothing here in Wrens they said and recommended Sandersville.  The Fall Line Freeway, a four lane through empty countryside, was just ahead and it went to Sandersville, thirty-four miles.  There was very little traffic.  I set the cruise control on 85 and pulled into the parking lot in front of the emergency room in 26 minutes.  Immediately admitted, I was taken to an examination room.  The ER staff performed a number of tests, one of which indicated a cardiac event.  I remained in the hospital for a little over four hours.  No recurrence of symptoms.  Martha arrived at the hospital while I was in the examination room.  I decided to drive back to Chapel Hill and see a cardiologist there.  We made it back with no further incidents.  Out of nowhere, no sound, implications uncertain. 

From isolated events one should be cautious of jumping to broad generalizations.  First, there is the problem of which events.  I paid attention to the girl in the Burger King but gave no thought to the dozens of people going about their productive day.  Then the issue of interpretation.  Did I read too much into a stuffed trash bag?  Finally, there is the one-way deterministic momentum.  Things, lives, may tend eventually to chaos, loss, and falling apart.  The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, they’re only made of clay, but not all things and not today.  And what about second chances, a spring to follow each winter.  ‘All things fall,’ wrote Yeats, but in the line that follows ‘and are built again, and those that build them again are gay.’ 

What am I writing about?  The taunt rope over the chaos, mortality, life’s fragile thread, the sense of treading water a little too deep to find sure footing.?  No solid place to stand?  Keep busy on things I can do.  Make something.  Will want’s a desk.  We have a house full of trim and it could all use some touch up.  A little caulk, a little paint, and door trim is bright again.  Go out in the yard and weed, prune, replace a few dislodged rocks in the ditch, straighten up the shed and rake out the few stray leaves.  I cranked up the motor on the boat.  A once-a-month check-off chore.  Do that, record the date, feel better.  The garage always needs organizing.  Simple tasks, the doing, sweeping away accumulating disorder, tamping down randomness. 

The weather has turned a corner.  After a February of clouds, cold, and rain it is sunny, March and warming days.  Dark winter moods start to lift with the clouds.  Life being in so many ways seasonal, the symptoms lighten with the return of Daylight Savings Time.  Spring.  In a few weeks, honeysuckles will flower.