August, or, First Fruits

 

I’ve always loved August. It’s my birthday month, and even though I’ve had mixed feelings about my birthday from year to year, exuberant one year, horrified the next, assessing losses and gains, it’s always a season for reflecting on my existence, my purpose, why I came into the world early in the morning on August the thirteenth in 1969, especially as I am demonstrably not a morning person. On my birthday, I can do absolutely nothing and still feel special. The year I turned thirteen, I sat on my grandma’s living room floor and watched a storm toss the waters of Lake Erie for hours and hours, aware of paradoxical sensations of solitude and communion. It was a great birthday. This year I had to work a bit harder; I threw myself a party, fried some chicken, and put on a fancy dress. I cried twice during the afternoon, fretting that no one would come to my party, but people came, hugged me, and sat by my bonfire even though we were getting chewed on by massive mosquitoes until raindrops fell late at night. I felt enormously vulnerable and enormously grateful.

August is also the season of first fruits, the earliest crops that will sustain agrarian communities through the winter. I’m drawn to the alliterative and prelapsarian resonances of the phrase “first fruits,” and I also appreciate it because even though it’s the “first,” it’s really the first again and again, year to year in a cyclical continuum of human need and fulfillment. Cycles of desire, fulfillment, and impatience for something different sometimes seem inevitable. We accrue our small, hard-earned lessons and then outgrow them, feeling wise and desperately ignorant by turns throughout the revolutions of our lives. Sufi mystics call themselves “Unknowers,” I think because they’re aware that knowledge can be a trap. It’s good sometimes to not know, to be unsure, even if it’s not comfortable. I relish late summer in part because I’m not completely aware of what winter will bring. For the unsustainable august moment, the grass is greener and more lush, crickets and cicadas sing more beautifully, late summer fruit is sweet and delicious. We have what we need and we’re wise enough to enjoy it.

This particular late summer is especially joyous for my family because my brother got married. For many people, marriage is an obvious step in one’s progression through life, a matter not of if but who and when. I think for Ethan it’s been more complicated than that, and his marriage to Marisa is actually the culmination of his personality, his trenchant and unusually admirable ratiocination at last tempered by a feeling in his heart that defies logic; he’ll do things Marisa wants him to do not because he’s reasoned it out perfectly, but because he likes to see her smile. It’s beautiful to see this emerge in my brother, and if it were possible, I love him even more for it. Days leading up to his wedding, they were surrounded by loving family and friends, everyone pitching in to make the country wedding a beautiful success despite forecasts of hurricanes. The Tempest was on my mind all week, and I wondered how I could weave it into my toast to the bride and groom, such a perfect Ferdinand and Miranda, and that was the extent of my hurricane preparations. We were all so focused on preparing for the wedding, carting all kinds of ornaments and delicacies to decorate a grassy mountainside, that we couldn’t really pay much attention to hurricane warnings, as well. We dealt with it by “positive thinking” it away, and it mostly worked. Loved ones came from near and far, hither and yon, and it was a gorgeous event. I wept and laughed and danced and sweated and hugged everyone who’d let me. Toward 9 pm, most guests gone, it started to pour, but we were drunk by then, dancing and careening and peripatetically cleaning beneath a tent in the wilderness drummed with a fury of raindrops. It was wonderful. We dragged soaking cases of wine up the hill in the storm and collapsed in our beds while the storm raged.

I woke up at about 7? 8? because my father had arrived from his B & B to tell us that we had to get up and go that very moment or else we’d all be trapped. He was shouting and moving with uncharacteristic rapidity. We all tried to shake the hangovers out of our heads. Dennis and Lauren (Eth and Marisa’s dear friends and the major movers in the whole event) had just returned from where the mountain road intersected Rt. 8A saying it was already impassable because of torrents of flooding on the road. There was more to do to clean up at the wedding site, and I think that those of us who were awake thought it would just be a matter of time—a few hours?—‘til the flooding subsided and we could drowsily drive away. It turns out, tho’, that in the whole trajectory of Hurricane Irene, Hawley, MA was one of the hardest hit spots. I thought about Ariel’s creepy little song:

Full fathom five

Thy father lies

Of his bones are coral made

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange.

Watching Dad tear away in his white minivan made the song more germane all of a sudden. Later, he would tell me that as he was driving down 8A, whole chunks of blacktop were spun away in furious currents of brown water. I have had nightmares like that—the road disappearing before you’re finished traversing it. Dad drove half a mile through a farmer’s field because the road was just gone. Somehow, he retrieved his wife from Shelburne Falls and safely returned home to my house in Easthampton.

Meanwhile, up on the mountain, the electricity had gone out, and then the landline. Cell phone reception was spotty, but we were able to garner some information—the National Guard were in Ashfield, catastrophic flooding throughout Franklin County and Vermont. We felt it more deeply, I think, because we were in the midst of it rather than safe in the valley, as close as that might be. The thirteen of us stranded there managed to make calls enough to apprise disbelieving bosses, get cats fed and chickens cooped, contact airlines, and assure that the State Police knew we were there, not that they could do anything. At about 9 am, we spilled some peanuts on the floor and swept them into the trash, joking about how we’d regret that later. As it is, food supply was not short, but food variety was, and I’m not going to crave peanuts or bagels for a long, long time. We tried to act responsibly, thinking about survival and escape, worrying for those on lower ground than we were. The most pressing shortage was diapers for my 6-month old nephew Forest. My 95-year old Gramma was happy to sit in the window and read, but when we talked about leaving the cars and hiking out, there were obviously some who would have to stay behind.

Forest and Gramma aside, we were still a strange assortment of personalities. My mom and Marisa’s mom, mostly responsible for caring for the baby and Uly, my 10-year old nephew (who has Downs Syndrome and is a handful even in ordinary conditions); Dennis and Lauren, Stephen and Cate, Ethan and Marisa, Marisa’s college friend Bil, me, Nick, and Nick’s friend Luke who I’d hired to tend the bar at the wedding. Not that I’ve ever seen Survivor, but I think the point is that social relationships are a key factor in survival. We could have survived together for longer than we ended up having to, and we would have made it work.

That morning, Bill, Luke, Lauren, and I hiked down the mountain road to look at 8A. On the way we saw trees down, rushing streams, part of a collapsed bridge, and gigantic rents in the blacktop. At the bottom, to the north the road was mostly gone and the waters spilled over the edge. To the south was a flood, an abandoned car, and further down, another collapsed bridge. I have never seen anything like it (well, I guess downtown Manhattan where I taught after 9-11 was a bit worse, actually); still, even tv news cannot always capture shots of such total devastation. We spent the rest of the day napping, talking, drinking wine, seeking information, projecting short and long term plans. I was too distracted to read either the Gulliver’s Travels or the September issue of Vogue I’d brought.  At some point in the late afternoon, it stopped raining and we saw a rainbow, but we thought it was just the eye of the storm and we didn’t thoroughly rejoice. Ethan whispered to me that he thought it was the end of the storm and that we’d be able to leave by the next day. That evening, Lauren, Dennis, and Nick cooked us all a wonderful dinner, and we sat up by the fire playing music and talking ‘til late. We had a few candles and a few bottles of wine. I was bone tired, unsettled, but also paradoxically content.

The thing about The Tempest is that it begins with catastrophe and ends with a wedding and the restoration of all that was believed to be lost. The sequence of our weekend was a little different, but I felt so surely that the emotional outcome was similar. Every wedding should be accompanied by a tempest, I think, because we need for all that old stuff—old hurts and resentments, bad habits, unhealthy family dynamics—to truly be broken down and washed away before a new life can really begin, in all innocence, with hope in our unburdened hearts. It’s time for first fruits again, in all their freshness and sweetness.

The next day was brilliant and serene and gorgeous. Luke and Nick woke early and prepared to hike out. I went with them for the first mile and half or so, and the damage was even worse than I imagined, reminding me of a blitz, of Godzilla, of post-apocalyptic zombie movies. When I kissed Nick goodbye, I didn’t know if it would be for a day, a week, or a month. He and Luke happily strode off north toward Shelburne Falls, about twenty miles away, and I envied their adventure a little bit. A few hours later Ethan got a call from Desi, Uly’s can-do mom, saying that she had driven her car within a couple miles south of our mountain, and was now hiking up to get him. We whooped it up when we met her down the road. True, between her car and us there were two downed bridges and lots of residual flooding, but the fact that she’d gotten so close gave us heart. Ethan, Des, Uly and I hiked back to her car through woods and fields, Uly shouting most of the way because he’s a little OCD and doesn’t like to get his feet wet. We laughed and joked, and the forest trees gleamed and everything smelled pungent and fresh. When Uly and Des were safely away, Eth and I hiked back the long way, over the roads, to see if we could assess the damage. Everyone was standing around outside their houses, and we all exchanged a few words, small stories, smiles, inquiries, best wishes. The DOT guys had already packed down one flooded bridge with rocks and sand, and were working on the second one as we talked to them. It was going to be a few hours, they said, but we would be leaving that day.

I had never fully rested up after the wedding preparations, the wedding, the hurricane, and so I dragged myself up that mountain one last time, Eth and I surveying both the destruction around us and the beauty of the mountain with wondering eyes. Seeing how quickly the works of civilization can erode away and vanish gives you some perspective on things—what you want, what you strive for, acquire, possess, and lose. Such cycles of want and fulfillment. My brother has reached a late summer richness in his life, a fulfillment of love and family and home that he deserves so completely. I was happy to take that walk with him because my divorce and consequent struggles have come between us a bit. I’ve been angry. I know I complain too much. That’s really hard to take, and harder to take in people you love, I think, because their misery pierces you more acutely. But looking around that sun-filled, tempest-tossed world on Monday afternoon, I knew for a certainty that I don’t want to be angry anymore, and I don’t want to complain. If I’ve been unable to change my life, it’s because the season is not right; it’s not my late summer. The phrase “winter of my discontent” fits more perfectly. I am a little broken, a little monstrous, maybe, but like Caliban, I still trust in the generous magic of the world:

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,

That, if I wak’d after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d

I cried to dream again.

As important as decision-making and action are, dreaminess and fantasizing are necessary, too. Rather than working in a restaurant and commuting to Queens to teach, I fantasize about working for the U.N. and feeding the hungry. I want to dodge bombs and educate women in Afghanistan. I want to become a best-selling novelist and cast Russell Crowe in the movie version, helping him to better understand his character in the autumn twilight on the Isle of Capri. These are fantasies, sure, but are they also true? Are they possible? Will they happen? Are they happening now in refracting parallel universes? I also want to live in my apartment forever, painting the front porch someday and working on the flower beds, visiting Beth next door for wine and HBO, working some less exalted but personally fulfilling job that pays my bills and allows me to visit the Isle of Capri for some special vacation. That’s a dream, too. There’s a thin, roving equinox that separates fantasy from reality, I think, from season to season. Reality seems a cocktail mixed of inequal parts of decision, luck, timing, will, fantasy, and fate, finished with a garnish of first fruits. I’ve bellied up to the bar, but the Greatest Bartender hasn’t noticed me yet, and before I take a sip of my reality cocktail, biting into that succulent garnish, I’m going to dream a bit longer.

         ...the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on...

What seems most real can vanish in an instant, and all we have left is ourselves, our dreams of ourselves. The Tempest is the shortest of all Shakespeare’s plays, and accordingly we were stranded just a short while, a long day and a half. The town of Hawley will struggle with the aftermath of the storm for quite some time, and the economic news for the state and the country is not so good. As for me, I think I’ve stopped my own financial hemorrhage, even if it means driving to Queens to teach twice a week. After doing it yesterday, my first Creative Writing class, I know I want something different. Academia has not found a place for me, and I don’t want to be its supplicant, begging for handouts. I need a life that makes sense to me. I’m looking for a new career, and if I have to go back to school, I’m resolved. I’m clear about what I want—good work, a place in the world from which to work my personal magic, and to regain whatever of myself I thought I’d lost in the stormy tumult of the past few years. I have feared that I’ve lost my hope, my heart, my charisma.

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange.

It’s not complete loss; it’s just a sea change. After the darkness of  Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Troilus and Cressida, and King Lear, Shakespeare produced his final batch of plays—critics call them the late romances—that testify that loss and death is not the end, that no tragedy is unaccompanied by love and courage and the reaffirmation of life, that whether we deserve it or not, restoration is possible. It’s dangerous to make light of tragedy, to comfort the grief-stricken because hopeful avowals can sound an awful lot like empty platitudes to someone whose heart is broken. Sometimes it’s better to just sit and weep with someone. But happiness is just as valid as grief, and when someone you love is happy, that can dry your tears, straighten your back, and sustain you until your own heart is restored. My brother’s wedding was beautiful, unforgettable, and profound. Though I have been tempest-tost, still I know I won’t be lost...