Detours of the Broken
“The heart, like the mind, has a memory. And in it are kept the most precious keepsakes.”
Firsts are rarely expected—whether it be a first taste of grief or a step into some place new. They catch you off guard. How do you recover? What resource do you draw on to come back from the edge of infinity? When the only way to come back is to go through, all you can do is forge ahead.
Wednesday in Santa Fe wasn’t our ideal trip to the old city, but it was peaceful. We rented a charming adobe by the square, and though we usually revel in every touristy delight, Woolfinia couldn’t quite find her energy this time.
I woke early and spent the morning writing and sketching on my walk through the town, making a few new friends along the way, as well as finding some excellent hot sauce and ginger jam. There is always tourism to be toured.
Back at home base, Woolfinia was mellow—as one should be on vacation. So, we breakfasted on wonderful eggs and ham with our newfound sauce and jam. The view of the mountains from our table of delights enhanced it all! No wonder painters live and work here.
We lazed through the morning. Reading letters between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, the history of the area and some Bible reading. Quite pleasant, quite edifying.
All that downtime — and a little romance reading — inspired a roll in the clover. Golden glows and mountain air work wonders on the libido. So we make love. It is slow and sweet and tender with thoughtful patience and consideration. Serenaded by the sounds of Emmy Lou Harris (Cosmonaut and Fire in the blood), Steely Dan (Brooklyn), James Gang (Tend My Garden), Dire Straits (Romeo and Juliet) and a few others. The luxuries and comfort of marriage.
Refreshed and relaxed, we finally make strides into the town about 4:30. But in short order, we realized that we have spent the entire day since breakfast without nourishment of a caloric nature. This mandates our first stop be something to eat.
How surprising that so many shops and restaurants close here at 5pm. Perturbing for two hungry souls. A little tension is good for a relationship and ours generates a few sparks over where to find food. That bore fruit when my little lupine lover discovers La Fonda. A massive adobe structure adjacent to the city square housing a fancy hotel. It is similar to one in which we stayed when in Taos. This in Santa Fe is much larger and more impressive. Clearly old, but not as old as its sister an hour away. Definitely as stately in any case.
The restaurant is too fancy for our lazy day wear. So we opt for the lounge, an adjacent bar with tables. And a stage.
It takes me a little time to bleed off the tension of the walk and disagreement about where to dine and I give our waitress, Mellissa, a little grief over needing a moment to settle. Ultimately, I order a beer. Woolfinia, her first margarita with salt.
She is quick to find happiness in the moment. I don't know if this is natural, or she has to try to find it. But it bubbles out with words of affirmation and encouragement to 'just relax'. The beer certainly helps.
After an order of truffle fries and some confusion over chicken quesadillas, we see the stage isn't just for show. A fit man in his 40's, a discount-Bono, plugs in various electronic doodads and components as well as a collection of guitars under the giant painting of a crow perched on a fence. Soon he's got an impressively complex array of wires. It looks to me like a musical Gordian knot—perhaps he will later cut it with his axe.
In short order arrives a horn player (Woody Harrelson), drummer (Jon Favreau), bass-man (Prince), and ivory-tickler (a chubby Ryan Gosling). It's a whole damn band! Clearly, we have fun with everyone's likeness.
They are good. Not great, but enjoyable. Woolfinia is a bit taken with the bass player and keeps telling me to smile so I don’t intimidate him. My natural reaction is amusement and laughter, thinking I couldn’t intimidate someone if I tried. The music is bright and loud and very rhythmic without being overwhelming. Perfect for dance.
Two lithe, energetic German dancers are now on the floor here at la Fonda. I guess at their nationality because they just have that vibe. They’re way too free and uninhibited to be American. The blond dumps her sweater to go skin-tight halter, garnering the immediate attention of the keyboardist and a couple of the servers.
She and her girlfriend, equally uninhibited, are very good dancers. Pros, maybe? They have the tight control of their limbs you don’t usually see in casual hoofers. They pair well with another long-time couple who fit and dance like hands in gloves. I am a little jealous — not just of their skill, but of how effortlessly they move through the world. I know I don’t have the drive to develop that grace, but tonight, maybe effort matters more than elegance.
I am not naturally a good dancer. Not even decent, unnatural or otherwise. But, my wife loves to dance and I try to accommodate her as often as I can muster. Tonight, unselfconscious and confident, I'm happy to indulge her as much as she wishes. We spin and whirl across the dance floor all night. Well, most of it anyway.
During one of the dances, Woolfinia says to me about her younger sibling (and best friend) that we lost in February, “My sister loved to dance, I'll bet her husband wished he'd danced with her more.”
This is not an accusation about my performance, it is an observation. A true one. We go to many dances, and often the women outnumber men 10 to 1. Of the dancers now, I am one of only two boys. Everyone else is girls. I think about how regretful a man with a wife who loved to dance would be if he suddenly found himself without her. My brother-in-law did a fair job, but I know he danced reluctantly.
Life is shorter than we think. Moments pass as do the people we love. I decide in this moment to never be hesitant about dancing with my wife again.
Even if I am terrible. Even if I count out loud: one-two, one-two, one, two, three to keep time. Even if she walks all over me and struggles at following my lead, I'll go and have fun with her and for her. I will make up in enthusiasm what I lack in skill.
The reflection draws up those salty lenses that make everyone blurry and my ears roar.
During the next break, she tells me a story of party she and her sister had been at 40 years ago. It's a touching recollection of youth and foolishness when we were young enough to rebound from bad decisions. Thankfully they made good ones that night and avoided pitfalls common to most. The triggering event of the story is my bride's recollection that they listened that night to 'Babe' by Styx. She asks me to have the band play it, but it isn't in their repertoire.
During a break, I lean on my phone and play 'Babe' loud enough for us both to hear. Unexpectedly, she starts to cry.
The music has carried her back to the moment all those decades ago and it's brought with it the countless moments since that she realizes are lost in all but her own memory. It's a flood of emotion that spills out in choked sobs and streaming tears.
“I miss her so much!,” she whispers “I just wish I could have seen her one more time. Just to laugh with her and tell her I love her. It’s so unfair. It shouldn’t have happened to her. I’m so sorry I didn’t realize how hard it is to lose a sister… I wish I’d been more supportive of you with yours.”
Her words of heartache move me to tears. We sit, two lovers in a cafe in the Southwest hugging and overwhelmed with emotion kissing to comfort one another. It is beautiful and heart-rending.
Our servers notice and express some condolence and support. This is an unusual circumstance in a place that is normally all celebration. Here we are playing the whole spectrum of emotion.
The music starts anew. Our wetness gets wiped away.
We’ve been sweeping the floor for an hour with only one or two other couples. Mostly Latin music filled with bongos and horns. Music I know well from countless Spanish dances over the years. Following a cover of Steve Miller’s 'Fly Like an Eagle', the dance floor is suddenly packed. It must be the song, Guantanamera. A famous rhythm, easily danced and the audience reacts.
My little wolf has had more than enough to drink and it shows in her wild abandon. I keep reeling her in to avoid collisions and after coming a little too close to the band’s tripod mounted phone used to record their performance, we decide to take a break.
Once started on a fire-liquid diet, my wife has a tendency to not want to stop. A wheel in motion will drink until stopped and the brakes were disabled when she has been sly about ordering doubles out of earshot and then with her big beautiful brown eyes, getting the barkeep to give her not one, but two gratis glasses of wine. I am particularly impressed at the size of the pours when I see they were left off of the bill.
Dancing may let you forget, but drink is to remember. And remember she does.
We dance until the band plays through their last song and then exit during the encore. She is always sensitive about exits—not too soon, not too late and not to obvious.
After two and half hours and two beers, it is a pleasant walk for me. For Woolfinia, it's much different. When she is liquified, she is surprisingly strong—and unbalanced. So one drunk walk becomes two as I attempt to keep her stable and vertical. I am immediately regretful I did not bring our transport. The walk is only 10 minutes, but it may as well be ten miles.
We stumble over to the oldest church in Santa Fe. It is after 9pm, but she pounds on the massive brass-clad doors demanding entry. Frustrated at the lack of reply she picks up three stones and before I can stop her, hurls them violently at the doors. They may as well have we been dandelion seeds against the monolithic structures.
However, I am now eager to make our way from the church and it would be good to have a place to seat her for a while, so I make our way back to the town square where we spend most of an hour sitting and listening to her cry and rail against the universe. Most of her ire is directed at her dead sister's family. They did not always make the wisest decisions and my wife knows that caused her sister no small amount of stress. She postulates it was the pressure that fed her cancer.
This is a first, her opening so honestly and directly. Normally, she speaks in frustrating innuendo and vague suggestion. It's startling that she's opening her heart and pouring it out so completely. I absorbe all of the 'I hates' and 'damned this' and 'to-hell-with-thats' with hugs and strokes of her hair and reassurance that there is nothing wrong with her feelings.
I encourage her to spit it out, let it gush into the night and cast it all against the stars and the moon. To try to blight them from the sky with her expulsions of rage and sadness. Rage, rage against that dying light. Do not go gently, my love, into this good night.
We cry together and I hold her and kiss her and try to soothe her pain that the alcohol has dredged up and left displacing all her other emotions. All I can offer is to be there.
I don't know which is worse, experiencing the heartbreak or watching someone experience it and be helpless to change anything. In this moment I am little more than a star or a tree, keeping watch as she rages against the dying of her own light. A fixed point for her as guide.
Getting home is an arduous task requiring answering constant questions about what this place or that is, who people are that we pass and why this or that. At one point, I simply have to carry this doll of a woman. And though I am no small man and once quite robust, carrying a flaccid human body is a terrific effort. I can only make it half a block at a time. When we near our corner, she insists I let her finish the walk.
I will be happy tomorrow that she does not recall spilling her into a garden when I set her on a short wall next to the sidewalk.
I am worried she will stumble and fall, something she is very good at. I've seen her take some serious spills but never get seriously injured. We attribute it to her small stature and that she was once a very good and flexible fast-pitch softball player. She should have been a stunt-woman. We get in the door without incident—well, except for the garden.
Now that we are home, her grief and anger turn to amorous intentions. She is never the aggressor in the physical aspects of intimacy, but tonight she is anything but timid. She presses me to the wall and insists on long deep kisses. Then yanks my shirt free and shoves me on the couch.
For the next half an hour she takes her anguish and aggression out on me in the most pleasant way possible. Her normally conservative and timid nature cast aside as she shouts with glee, completely unrestrained. The adobe is warm so the windows are all wide and the shades pulled. She couldn't care less. The semi-public nature of our lust seems to thrill her.
She eventually becomes SO vocal I am concerned the neighbors will complain, so excuse myself briefly to close those openings mostly likely to spill our vibrations into the night air.
She is ravenous and adventurous and though I feel a slight tinge of guilt that I know she isn't completely herself, the activity is so enjoyable I can't stop myself. Everything that had been slow and tender and quiet about our lovemaking earlier in the day is now abandoned for desperate and passionate weaving of our souls. Our soundtrack is our own hurried breaths and shouts crescendoing with her sharp cries of ecstasy.
Having finally purged herself all of her energies, negative, positive or otherwise. I deduce she is an empty vessel as I hear her pleasant light snores nestled into my neck. Windows reopened, the breeze makes my arm goose-pimple and my scalp tingle. I make sure she is covered against the dry mountain air. Curled together like two lovers cast in tephra for eternity.
My quiet prayers are for her to have peace and a calm heart—for this night to have been a catharsis in some way. So that it will ease the suffering she has been carrying these past few months having lost both a best friend and sister as well as the one man she trusted in all the world; her father.
In my twilight, on the last night here in Santa Fe, I realize this may be the purpose for the journey: to help her heal. I thought it was to heal my own wounds, and no doubt that will be true. But in her case, I didn't understand that though months have passed, she had not yet begun the process of recovery. Instead, internalizing it and hoping it would pass. But the sorrow just became an albatross around her neck that grew larger and larger each day.
Tomorrow, we will journey to Las Vegas for the hot springs. I have no doubt her overindulgence will leave her feeling less than whole, so I kiss her gently on the forehead as I slip away to slumber and hope the springs can help her heal physically as I hope the day has helped her emotionally and spiritually.
Sometimes there is no one to call for help. Sometimes, there just aren't enough rocks.
#confession #travel #essay #death #storytelling #write #100daystooffload #cancer
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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