"Good news?" he asked. His whole face was a wide smile with sparse teeth. The ones that remained angled and layered with relaxed freedom, quite like his wild cloud of white hair that billowed in all directions from his crown. He leaned forward with a subtle hunch as though he wished he had a walking stick or a staff.
I was stepping down the steps outside the post office. Pinpricks of rain tingled my cheeks. A respite from the heat taunted us from on high. It never delivered.
"Well, kind of!" I replied.
The truth is I had just thrown away a vitriolic letter from my hostile former landlord who illegally deducted money from my security deposit without warning, despite leaving my rental in perfect condition. I was angry. Injustice, no matter how small, stings my soul somethin' fierce. My ex-landlord is currently surrounded by hundreds – maybe thousands if you individually counted the jewelry and coins – of artifacts bought cheaply in the 70's from all over the world. Three days into my year-long lease I wished I'd never committed to, he sat me down and explained himself unsolicitedly, as though his guilty conscience simmered in the presence of a young person in today’s scrutinizing age.
It was only naïveté that sent him abroad on missions of plunder, he explained.
"I guess they call it 'cultural appropriation' or something now, but back then it was just fun!"
Now he sells these items for tens of thousands of dollars to fill people's mansions with art. And deprives me of justice because the old cast iron tub chipped as he expected it to, but somehow it’s my fault. I was angry. But then a man interrupted my frenzied, frustrated, errand-filled afternoon, and I paused. I paused to notice the soft blue irises peering at me beneath thick white eyebrows, wrapped with wrinkled ravines of age.
"Nothing makes sense these days, huh?" this kind, smiling elder on the sidewalk prompted next.
"What do you mean?" Where could this possibly be going, I wondered internally.
"Well, there's nothing to orient to anymore. Back in my day, you knew where the lines were and you knew not to cross them. And when you crossed them, it was clear what would happen. There was a sense of order. There was reason. There was logic. It's not to say everything was easy and good but generally you knew what things meant. There were limits. You could understand the world. You knew what to expect from a mayor or a president.”
He spoke in a way that sounded Irish, but soon I realized it was the endearing Norteño accent. It's peculiar and distinct, like a relic from a bygone era, like a convergence of Celtic and Cajun and Diné Bizaad (Navajo lanugage). Or maybe it's none of those things and you'll just have to hear it yourself one day, but everyone here is endeared to it. It’s like a rite of passage. If you can detect that Norteño accent, you know a thing or two about the deep cuts of this place.
"Everything feels upside down,” I offered.
"No! There is no upside down because there's no up or down anymore!" He implored instantly.
He continued with a monologue riddled with ambiguity. I wondered if it would veer toward conspiracy, but it didn't. It remained pragmatic, grounded, relevant. He told me he was stationed at Fort Bliss, the military base in my hometown, and was deployed around the world. He spoke of what he'd seen around the world over decades of enlistment, and how everything changed in watershed years he witnessed firsthand. He was in Jerusalem in '67 during the Six-Day War, Tehran in '79 when the Shah of Iran fled (with one horrifying implication being the dangerous replacement of “Shah” with “Ayatollah Khomeini” – revealing itself increasingly in this moment), the USSR in '89 when it began its collapse. He spoke critically of US interventions that decapitated stable heads of state and bred impossible monsters in their place. He spoke of the lack of reverence for context and history that is proliferating distortion and manipulation today.
He spoke of the pandemic and the surreality of life ever since. Streets emptied and apocalypse prevailed and people left and didn't come back. They're here but they don't make sense. They're here but they're not themselves. They’re here but they’re unpredictable and afraid. They left and they didn't come back.
And then he talked to me about God, not religion, God. The God in each of us. He said, “in the end, no matter how exponentially senseless the world seems to be, it doesn't actually need to make sense from our two-legged, gravity-bound, time-limited perspective.” That, in fact, our desperate need to make sense of everything only takes us further away from the universal principles that govern life in service of the continuation of life. Fear is what drives out love. Our only covenant here is to be a living embodiment of God, the God that dwells in us uniquely and specifically. To let that force light us from within and be the testimony of our lives. To love. To light.
He did not preach, he simply offered an alternative. Our conversation was a literal manifestation of his guidance. We began in the thick indecipherable muck of straining for comprehension and direction, we traversed the territory of living through “biblical” times, and that took us to God to remember something transcendent and eternal. Yet we remained humbled by the uncertainty that infuses all of these realms because ultimately we have no clue.
Here we are with paths before us that span the spectrum of destructive to generative. Then free will enters the scene in this cause-and-effect reality of duality.
"Wow, this conversation is coming at the right time. I've had a rough day. What a serendipitous encounter!"
"A divine appointment, Rachel!"
His being was an unhurried expression.
Maybe his day was the simplicity of meaningfulness that is possible in a different way when you're an elder. You're at a point in your journey where your life was your life. You've been lucky to live past the harrowing years of trying to *be* someone, you've met the demons of your troubled childhood or your complicated past a thousand times over now and they're all either friendly or so familiar or so unconquerable you've had to surrender the battle one way or another. You've lived the life that was lived no matter what you dreamed for yourself and you've grieved all the dreams that never were. And of course we don't all go gently into that good night with the peacefulness of accepting what is and has been... but there is something different about being on the other side of all the ambition and expectation of what a life could be. You've done it, one way or another.
In other words, your moment in the sunshine with a stranger doesn't distract you from that unfinished novel haunting you with its incompletion, doesn't delay you from tending to that ticking time bomb in your ovaries, doesn't impede those emails burdening your sleep or those endless to-do's keeping your life afloat at a very basic level, doesn't threaten your entire becoming. Of course, the paradigm can flip and this wistful contemplation of projected ease could be the scam of "grass is greener" thinking. I get that. Perhaps, when there are fewer years ahead than behind you, the ticking time bomb moves from your ovaries to your heart or your mind or your lungs, and the stakes feel high in a different way. I don't know. But this man seemed satisfied. This man reminded me how to live, now. With the simplicity of meaningfulness
"I'm just a humble man," he said. "I didn't study mathematics. I went to war for a nation that isn't a nation anymore. Leave the mathematics to the mathematicians."
I didn't know what that meant. I still don’t. But in a completely indecipherable and surreal way, it was the perfect conclusion to our divine appointment.
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So lovely to be with your writing again Rachel. And the post seems to have disappeared but I was so moved by the excerpt of your novel… and I really hearing about your writing process too
❤️ thank you for sharing
"Our only covenant here is to be a living embodiment of God, the God that dwells in us uniquely and specifically. To let that force light us from within and be the testimony of our lives." !!!!!!!