Friday Letter

It doesn’t feel like Friday today. I think I’ve been on the back foot because I have been out of town and in a different time zone so that’s always a little discombobulating. And I’m here because my mom was in the hospital and though she’s out now and doing much better it added to my feeling disoriented. Plus, well, the world. There are so many things that don’t make any sense right now. I know it’s been that way for centuries, but sometimes it just hits harder. All this to say that I wanted to post something today but the first piece I wrote needs to be in the oven a little longer, so I am sharing something I wrote this morning, and also a book report, which may or may not be a report so much as encouragement to read something.

My Mom’s Oxygen Machine

My mom’s oxygen machine sounds like a person breathing when I hear it down the hall. It sounds like a person getting up out of a chair on the exhale, on the 1-2 down beat. Like a mid-sentence sigh, not mid-sentence but mid-serious discussion where you give a little pssshh because you can’t decide whether to continue speaking to an idiot who doesn’t understand completely. Now I’m chuckling because that is 100 percent what it sounds like, I wish you could hear. It also sounds like my grandfather, the king of sighs. He’d sigh like he was never going to get over what you had just told him. Managgia. You could hear it from the other room. You’d be walking down the hall to go say hello and you’d hear that sound, that 6 second exhale, and you’d turn right around and go back where you came from. I can still hear it now, even though he is in another realm, long gone.

The oxygen machine is here, but my mom is upstairs lying down. Pssh thump. It’s a reverse rimshot. I took a red-eye here and am delirious, something I realized when I tried to speak a full sentence and couldn’t. Everyone was here a little while ago to say hello and have lunch and love each other up and now it’s just me and my sister’s dog who glances at me with that one small eye shift that all dogs do when they know everything and feel bad for you. I flew in last night on the red eye and boy my arms are tired. Badum psssh, thank you and goodnight everybody.

My mom’s oxygen machine sounds like a Philip Glass concerto that you don’t know the end of. It repeats over and over and starts to do a strange thing in your imagination where something builds and builds almost like a screaming tea kettle or the 4th movement before the finale, but then it just goes back to normal. It was just your thoughts going crazy. The oxygen machine is doing the same thing it’s been doing all along. Working. Keeping things peaceful and safe, keeping things going.

My Book Report

I am reading a memoir by

Abigail Thomas

called What Comes Next and How to Like It and I can’t put it down, it reminds me of school and growing up and friends who I know like family even though it’s not about any of those things. It’s just one short piece after the next about recovering from the death of her best friend of 30 years who was a guy she was also in love with (at moments), and who had an affair with her daughter. It’s a novel, a story of life and death and everything in between. Is that giving away too much?

We do such complicated things to people we love. Over and over we do this. Even as we see that’s exactly what we are doing. We can’t help it. We are drawn to them, to things and places too, because of the way they make us feel, because they paid attention one afternoon in a car ride, and then we mess our lives to repeat the experience. And while we’re busy messing up our lives a death, an illness or something of grave magnitude bursts in and shows you how nothing else matters. There’s a scene where she is grieving alone in bed and actually gets frightened in the dark, hit with a terrified aloneness, and then the dog farts a smell so bad she has to get out of the bed holding the collar of her nightgown over her nose. Thank God. And that’s what the book is about.