For the last few nights I have been awake in the wee hours, and not so much struggling with demons as just thinking. I must add quickly, though, that last night one monkey swung through, “howling and spitting”, as one writer puts it, and I had to set him straight real quick, “kiss my ass”, I murmured, attempting to refuse his intent that I revisit things I cannot change. Talking to myself in my bed in the middle of the night, of course. Who else am I going to talk to?
To give myself a sense that forward movement is at work, my tiny piece of real estate here in Santa Fe is a-jumble as I have begun readying for a return to Texas. My friend Jane from East Texas called late yesterday to ask about my change of plans, to head back early, why. I’ve been told that it’s a Virgo thing, this suddenly realizing that it’s time to go. And I was witness to what on any other day I would call impulse when my friends, Joy and Judy, who have been summering north of Santa Fe for close to three decades, spent the night with me a couple of weeks ago, as they headed back to what they know for the better part of any year. Wednesday morning came, and as we sat on my tiny, tiny balcony, drinking coffee and munching buttered toast, Joy—my Virgo parallel of a kind—announced, “Judy, I’m ready to go.” They were in separate vehicles, but planning to journey together this day to Amarillo for the night, mother and daughter pilgrims, best friends. Not to worry about any of the plans that we had discussed the day and night before. It was time to get on the road, to set things in motion, to be settled, once again, in whatever comes next. I know.
Live in the present, what? Can you say that in Harold dialect? I have to tell myself that some good things are on the horizon, right here, and indeed, the days of cool, dry air beneath sunny New Mexico skies deserve my attention. Those weedy Texas garden beds that I have demonized once again in my mind—not to minimize their reality—will have their way with me soon enough—those mornings that begin with temperatures and humidity not for the faint of heart, and mosquitoes that leave welts the size of a dime on the likes of me. And any list I have made or will make is just another list. It has no power of its own. It’s only a game I play with myself, a way of feeling better about the inevitable. What do we do when the time comes where we can’t do anything about the list, but wait out its last entry? Considering that eventuality should be enough to bring a sigh of acceptance.
As the clock moves toward my return to Texas, I am running my traps, as if I will not have another chance to forage in this high desert place. “There’ll always be another slice of pecan pie,” I have often told myself, justifying my hard-fought battle to say “no” when temptation curls its finger toward me. In this place, now, I just want to luxuriate in the familiarity of what has become my home over the last year—a home that has been hard-nosed to yield anything that feels like kin or a friend who cares about my loneliness. I’m working my way through barbershops, looking for the perfect shaved head, gathering trophies and wrapping them tenderly for the journey south, yearning already at the prospect of seeing aspen and cottonwood on fire from the sweetness that will bring them to brilliance by the time the lone star gives me up again to the high plateau.
Midnight Murmurs—Santa Fe, New Mexico (August 18, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis
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