One generation passes away, and another generation comes; but the earth abides forever. This was a no-brainer for the author of Ecclesiastes but for us, forever has lost its distinction, its credibility. We can't count on it. It's become unreliable like snow in January. Forever, it turns out, is a scoundrel, a womanizer, an over-hyped Hollywood romcom. To say goodbye to this central illusion is to fall into a sinkhole. These days in New England, it sometimes snows in honor of Dr. King's birthday, but sometimes nothing falls out of the sky but freezing rain, daring me to walk down the treacherous steps to the driveway to scrape the frost off the windshield. And sometimes, it's sixty degrees in January and I get to wallow in the guilt of enjoying what I know isn't a good thing. Cotton candy for breakfast.The loss of forever casts a dark, elongated shadow. It puts greater pressure on the present. It demands that I look reality in the eye in a way that I resent and resist. I can't expect anything going forward. I can't count on a damn thing. Neither good health, nor wisteria, tumbling purple over a fence, nor witnesses, standing red-faced before the Senate. All I have is now, sitting on a deck in Panama, one more gringo in Paradise, letting the winter do whatever it's doing back home while I hide from it. All I have is the company of words to encourage me when I fear for the future. Words are my friends. They make nice to me. They graciously allow me to twist them into unexpected shapes like animals made from balloons at children's birthday parties and bounce them around like ice in a cocktail shaker at parties for grownups. Even so, in my writing I am aware, that I long to skate backwards into a time that feels reassuringly less like a horror movie. This may be another flavor of cotton candy, another sticky confection designed to sugarcoat reality.
I remember how my mother looked lying in her nursing home bed with the railings raised, her eyes unfocused, her cheeks hollowed out. She would not allow me to tell her she was beautiful, shaking her wobbly head vehemently from side to side and tsk tsking. She didn't remember much by then, but she remembered beautiful. How she could weaponize her crossed legs and fluttering eyelashes to get things done. How it had been decades since she was that person. But I refused to see it that way. When I looked at her, I saw the grace of her earlobes and her narrow wrists and I thought this will go on from here to eternity. I embraced the illusion of forever even though she died five days later. If it's true, as I read recently, that a writer is someone who plays with the body of his [sic] mother, I must be Shakespeare's second cousin. I am avid for her, for her long life that appeared to go on and on and the stories I continue to tell about it.
It's curious that I'm pondering endtimes here on the southern edge of the continent, dense with jungle vegetation, an opera of birds singing, a nearby creek whispering. It may be the long days absent errands, appointments with the auto mechanic, the skin doctor. It may be the burnt faces of the indigenous farm workers descending the hillsides at the end of the day, exhausted. I can't tell if they are registering any variation in the anxious stink pouring off the American body politic. These people, the Ngobe, have harvested the coffee since pre-Columbian times. Every barista at every Starbucks in Seattle owes her job to them. This ancient way of life could vanish, a victim of climate change. What if there's not enough rain? Or too much?
As a hedge against extinction, I buy a bag covered in a geometric design made by the Kuna people from the San Blas Islands in Caribbean Panama. Later, online, I learn that the islands may be rendered uninhabitable from sea level rise later in the century. For everything there is a season, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote. This is the season of disbelief and the season of denial. As the sun revolves around the earth, there may come a time when spring will not follow winter or when all the seasons become confused and forget the natural order of things as we perhaps already have.
Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com
