Natchitoches, Louisiana, and the end of notes from the trip. There’s nothing else I wrote about, so here I am nearly 15 years after I made this journey with Aunt Eleanor and Grandpa Herbert, both of whom have since passed away, and I need to come up with some kind of narrative that might flow with the previous 12 days that had copious notes.
To be honest, there’s not a lot left in my head about this leg, and what I posted in those other entries didn’t trigger some deep memories that I can harvest to fill this space. We were on the way home, but there were so many photos I wanted to share as we were obviously not rushing back to Phoenix. So now what?
Kind of like a traffic signal in the middle of nowhere; death shows up, and we come to a stop. Ten months after this trip across America’s southern states, my maternal grandfather passed away. He was the last surviving grandparent I had, and then a few years after that, in 2009, my great-aunt Eleanor died at the age of 97. Eleanor was Herbie’s older sister.
The memories of family that have moved on can, at times, be like a body of water in that they are there, but they might be somewhere just below the surface. Over time, much of that water will evaporate, and while it can fall back to earth, there is little likelihood that you’ll ever see it again. Like with water, there are places where memories run deeper, but without the proper craft, we may not know how to reach them.
This simile is how I feel I can best express myself today as I look inward, trying to remember who my relatives were during this time in their lives. The existential nature of being on a path to learning who we are doesn’t leave a lot of bandwidth for trying to know who others were and how they got there. They were more like fixtures of fully-formed selves that I simply couldn’t comprehend thinking they already had arrived at who they were – or did they? How often do we consider that the elderly are still becoming?
It’s simultaneously funny and tragic that the folly of our ignorance doesn’t allow us to see that the elderly, too, might be on a never-ending path of becoming and that curiosity could still be introducing them to things they don’t know. Instead of greater sharing across generations, we operate in distinct and separate universes where the age of experience draws a line between us while our youth or advanced age suggests there’s no chance the other could begin to relate to us.
Time is the road, we are the vehicle, and our evolving memories are the passengers. The paths we travel are ever-present, be they dirt traces that deliver the traders of goods, invisible skyways that fly people overhead, or trails that lead us on canyon hikes. What is not so easy to see or find are the memories of others who seem to rarely encounter each other at random intersections.
Our photos can act as great signposts that show us where we’ve been but it is only the words we commit to a surface of things that can exist beyond their otherwise short lives in our heads. Once written, they might allow others to know something about who we were and how we came to perceive things the way we did.
This idea speaks volumes to what we do and don’t do to exist beyond the time when our exhausted bodies cease being the vehicles that are responsible for allowing others to meet us on the highway of life. Trinkets, photos, pieces of old clothing, wedding bands, or various possessions cannot share the person we were or knew. Just as we have taken to leaving these mementos to those who have loved us, we fail to give them an intrinsic gift of that look within us while we are still breathing.
Telling of these travels in life and where our road into our own infinity was taking us is the only trail of crumbs we might be able to offer. An exercise of writing about how we got to the places we arrived at should be part of our everyday life, just as sleeping and eating are. I’m not saying just our literal travels and explorations of places we visited but telling the story of how we came to be who we are emotionally and intellectually when wandering in our minds.
Sadly, I feel that too many of us are long defunct after having abandoned the processes where we serve a human function aside from feeding the machine of commerce, parenthood, and the expectations of others who require our affirmation of their bland conformity. Only a few of us are out here to encounter the extraordinary and rare sights that bridge eras, epochs, cultures, and the very act of trying to know anything about something.
Does it matter that you might have but one more cow among the many grazing in the meadow? Who of us raises our head out of the tightly packed herd to say, here I am? It will be the cow that constructed a monument to bovine-ness, using its cloven hoof to sculpt an object of beauty that leaves us astonished at its feat we thought impossible.
We have to leave our story to others so they might be witnesses to the monument to ourselves, allowing them to better understand who and what we were. We focus on the geniuses, celebrities, and those ordained by taste-makers to be our cultural representatives, but that tells little of the ordinary and unexceptional cogs in the machine that goes about a life living in a pasture called the city.
Have you ever left your own pasture? Did you take the uncomfortable and bumpy road where your expectations of particular creature comforts failed to meet your desires? Trying new foods, sleeping in strange beds, adapting to different weather, and talking with others who seem to speak a foreign language due to their different frames of reference can be a challenge for almost everybody. But consider the risk of being the flea on the ass of the beast next to you in the field you have always lived in before asking in your later years if you experienced anything resembling real freedom?
The contentedness of staying in place is for cattle. We are humans meant to explore not just the physical world but the options of what we want to know and believe as we encounter those who might lend affirmation to a life of intellectual uncertainty. My family without me appreciating it when I was younger, were nomads having left Germany, moving around upstate New York, heading to Florida for a while, and finally ending up in Arizona. They weren’t afraid to wander. Then, in their 80s and 90s, they wanted to see America from a different perspective, as prior to this trip, they stayed on major highways or flew to their destinations. Being out on a journey over back roads with me was an adventure that presented many new experiences to these retirees that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to take or endure.
When I say they had to “endure” this trip, don’t think for a minute that it was always easy for them to travel so far. Sitting in place for long periods when they might want to stretch their legs. Being too hot, too cold, hungry, thirsty, or needing a bathroom in the next 10 seconds had them making compromises with creature comforts that are readily available at home. Their remaining paths in life didn’t have a long time left to travel (my grandfather had less than 12 months to go). Herbie was an inspiration to me for many a year. Ever since I was a small boy I was fascinated by him, from his work as a painter and woodworker to piloting his yacht on the Niagara River and Lake Erie. He was a giant who did stuff. In the 1970s, he had open-heart surgery, but for the next 30 years, he never slowed down. He was always up for making the sacrifices that took him out and into the new.
My Aunt Eleanor was a rock to me. She was my mother when my own 16-year-old mom couldn’t meet my demands as a teenager. Not only did Auntie care for my sister and me, but she was also caring for her own mom, my great-grandmother Josephine. As a 5-year-old boy, I could have never comprehended that my aunt loved me as much as her own mom. Auntie gave selflessly of herself and never seemed unhappy. While she didn’t marry until she was nearly 70 years old and lost her husband after only about 15 years of marriage, my great-aunt had one of the greatest dispositions of anyone I might ever know in my lifetime.
Those two are now like the trees over there on the other side of the fence; they are out of reach but not fully out of view. They live on in my heart and memories, and if I’m lucky and ever pass this way again, I hope to catch a glimpse of them. How much of who they were and precisely what they instilled in who I’ve become cannot be separated from the totality of me, but I know that there is goodness they carried that spilled into me in some small or hopefully big way. Time will tell.
Late in the day, we were driving into the sunset just as everyone does every day, but while we were closing in on dinner and a hotel, little did any of us have in mind that the last one was always on the horizon. While our time on earth allows us to perceive hints of what infinity might be, we will not be afforded the opportunity to be witness to even a fraction of what that means. Knowing the rarity of our time here, walking under such beautiful skies should never be taken for granted. Leave your routine people, and even when you can’t leave home, you can still leave the well-trodden paths in your mind and venture into the unknown. Books are a great first start if you’ve forgotten the way to see into the realms of possibility.
It’ll be dark soon enough, and when you can never see the light or find your mind illuminated by the fire of existence again, there will be no time for regrets. The story will be done, and your chapter will be finished. While we might be able to jam 100 days of experience into a single day, we cannot stuff a lifetime of existence into the final 10 minutes before we die. So, how’s your own story going?
