Two Easters

Easter...theological arguments aside, it’s a time of rebirth...connected—call it a big coincidence if you want—along with all the pagan fertility symbol rabbits & eggs—to the vernal equinox...everything coming back to life...which would make it kinda the opposite for our friends in the southern hemisphere...but anyway...

...it was right around Easter two years ago when I decided I had to leave my lonely apartment outside of Ithaca, NY, and move to Philly...an area where I’d really never conceived of living again...the site of all my early—and not-so-early—failures...representing everything I’d been running away from ever since...even as it kept pulling me back...like Michael Corleone in Godfather III...okay, maybe nothing like that...but still...there were some lengthy periods in my 20’s...coming home broke and unsure of where to go next...working lousy temp jobs and hiding in the storage room upstairs to smoke weed listening to the Stones’ Black and Blue album every evening after work like a strange pathetic ritual...you’re just a memory of a love that used to be...after that, only a couple times a year to visit family, though at times things got so strained I didn’t wanna go at all, and sometimes didn’t...and to visit an old friend or two...but that was it...

...until everything changed in the summer of 2005, when my dad died suddenly...less than a week after I’d finished teaching my last college class...the day before August 15th, which I’d declared as day one of my new life writing full time, as I’d always wanted to do... in between, I’d visited with the family...had breakfast with mom and dad at a restaurant on the Cape May boardwalk on Saturday the 13th, when dad, not generally known for putting a positive spin on things, told me how excited he was that I was setting out into the unknown like this...like Walt Whitman: The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted, Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find...though neither of us knowing just how far from a safe, familiar harbor I was gonna get, or how soon....got the call the next day, while visiting friends on the way home...an urgent message left on my cell phone by my older brother while I was at the beach: call me tonight repeated a couple times with an unmistakable urgency...making clear that, whatever it was, I didn’t want to know, but needed to hear it anyway, as soon as possible...

...a year and half later, on Easter, mom, isolated and ailing, seemed to be tumbling downhill at an alarming rate...complaining incessantly about various physical problems, increasingly unsteady, memory disappearing fast, making clear more than once that she didn’t want to live many more years...and then, on Easter afternoon, when she finally rose from bed, things appeared suddenly to have gotten far worse...she couldn’t, it seemed, complete a full sentence, voice drifting off after a few words....my younger brother took her to the hospital, thinking maybe she’d had a stroke... I’m not sure what we ended up doing for Easter dinner...probably just fended for ourselves, taking whatever was in the fridge....I thought, and in retrospect was probably right, that she’d lapsed into a deep depression...not that I knew what to do about it...

...that was something I had a rather immediate familiarity with at the time....kayaking through the mangroves in Key West a month or two earlier hardly putting a dent in it...so overweight I couldn’t stand looking at pictures of myself from that trip...intense tension headaches every day...increasing amounts of ibuprofen every night, along with either a bottle of red wine or a six pack or two of Corona...and junk food, lots and lots of junk food...thinking I might need to start buying weed again, since being a stoner seemed preferable to descending into alcoholism...painfully lonely where I was living...barely any friends except long-distance, any romantic prospects seeming further and further out of reach...the big plans of a year or two before steadily crumbling into dust but no really promising ideas on the horizon...my life seeming in as inevitable and frightening a decline as my mother’s, if forty years earlier....really, I didn’t have much to lose in picking up and moving, even if it was to Philly...

Sitting here in limbo, waiting for the dice to roll
Sitting here in limbo, got some time to search my soul
Jimmy Cliff

...two years later, mom’s health problems are largely under control, even if her memory isn’t what it once was...and she’s a lot happier with two of her sons nearby, one of us at the house every weekend...a month or two after that Easter, I found an apartment and a friendly, reasonably healthy community in West Mt. Airy, State of Quiet Integration, USA...an easy train ride, or an eight mile bike ride through Fairmount Park along the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River, to center city...a ten minute walk from the largest, wildest urban park in the world...got back into yoga shortly after arriving, a lot more seriously than before...finding through that a way to stop the tension headaches, as well cutting out the nightly boozing without reverting to old bad habits...in many ways healthier than I’ve ever been physically and...somewhat...mentally...still working on that...including gradually making peace with my past...as this blog attests three or four times a week...at Easter 2009, still in a transitional period that seems to go on and on, with no particularly solid end in sight...but coming to realize that’s not necessarily such a bad thing...