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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
I wrote this down as we set out along the fire road that leads to a steep trail, with Lily, our 1-year-old Rottweiler-Shar-Pei mix, racing ahead. "Did you ever notice how much Lily looks like Benicio Del Toro?" Sam asked. I wrote this down, too. It is true.
He and Lily dropped behind me, and I walked along lost in my thoughts and the beauty of the woods. After a while, I reached the meandering high trail that weaves through bay and laurel groves. You get all the climates here on the mountain; first the English dappled shade, where it's cool and smells like spring and mulch, and then a few minutes later you come out from under the trees and you're in Sicily, in bright blue heat.
Hearing commotion, I turned to find Sam. He was smashing and bashing the ground with a branch, whacking at the low-hanging branches as if they were piñatas. Rather than a short talk on honoring the ecosystem that he and his fellow students have studied extensively, I continued along. I rest in silence and music and long strides, while he rests in noise and motion.
After a moment, he stopped, and the silence was broken only by birdsong, our footsteps, and invisible animals moving around in the fallen leaves and twigs. Then Sam started whistling. His grandfather taught him to whistle when he was 4 -- his adopted grandfather Rex, my father's best friend of 30 years. My father died 10 years before Sam was born, and I was still struggling with an achy emptiness, a feeling that my life had been diminished by half at his death. How would my books and Sam even matter if my father wasn't around to be proud? Now he's been dead for 25 years, as long as I knew him alive, and sometimes when I've done something fabulous, I feel like a gymnast who has performed a flawless routine in an empty auditorium.
Sam looks a lot like my father did as a boy. Sam also looks like his own father, whom we found when Sam was 7, three years after Rex taught Sam to whistle. The first time Sam and I took a walk with Sam's father, John led the way through the woods behind his own father's house, where he grew up, 10 miles in one direction from my childhood home, 10 miles in the other from the house where I live now. Sam walked shyly 10 or 15 feet behind his dad, and I took up the rear, feeling terror and grief that I was finally having to share Sam. But it cheered me to hear Sam whistling away. It wasn't that he didn't feel shy and nervous; it was just that Rex had taught him how to whistle.
Rex was one of the three men who helped raise him during his first five years, the others being my brother Steve, who taught Sam how to wrestle and goof off, and his unofficial big brother Brian, who was bathing and diapering him at 2 weeks old, and taking him on adventures ever since -- canoeing, train rides, farmer's markets. Rex's specialties were camping and workshop. They spent hours together in Rex's workstation when Sam was young, hammering, nailing, talking, silent. He discovered that Sam connects with his own spirit most when he is working with his hands. He would study a nail, or a washer, as if he was holding a butterfly in his hand.
Sam dropped back from me on the trail, then caught up, an edgy psycho-scamper. He stabbed the air with his sword; so joyous, so masculine. He's always picked up anything that can be used to smash other things with, or to make bombs with, or to destroy piles of leaves or sand or stones. He's a closed current of energy, like those flashlights you squeeze to make the wires connect inside, and they pour forth their light. He catches up to me for a few minutes and we walk along in silence. He's so transparent at these times, like a baby, without any of the barriers or labyrinths we set up later because we get so afraid.
People told me how utterly transparent with beauty babies can be, but I don't think anyone mentioned what beasts they are. So it was dicey going for a while. I have a photo on my wall of a baby in Sudan, breast-feeding, and she looks like chocolate, wrapped in a blue and lavender napkin, pressed into what little we can see of her mother's brown-black breast. This is a very universal baby, a safe baby. I had thought Sam would be more like this one, more of the time. I saw the same flatness in Sam's nose when he nursed, like the Sudanese baby trying to get as close as possible to what nourished her, and the same deliciousness of baby arms. But the clutch of her fingers should have tipped me off -- that grasping and clutching might come with the territory, grasping and clutching at you, and then pushing you away; and the openness of the baby's ear -- these babies are listening, can hear, and will use what they hear against you one day.
