Really Deep Thoughts

I remember a moment in the fall of 1998 very well. I was running through the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains, running alone that afternoon. The sun was setting, and its golden glow bathed the chaparral and me in its slow warmth, welcome after another fast and hot day in the Inland Empire. I followed the trail towards a ridge line passing from south to north, blood surging in my veins and endorphins spreading in my brain, the smell of sage and dust filling my lungs. As I reached the ridge line, I slowed to notice the sun resting on the horizon to my left- a puddle of gold and blood pooling just before disappearing- then caught a glimpse of the full moon peaking up over the horizon to my right. I stopped and took some moments to absorb the view in both directions. I thought about my unique position between the gravitational fields of the moon and the sun, the pull strongest when they are in opposition at the full moon, surely affecting our bodies as the pull is affecting the tides and the water tables on earth. I wondered how many people across the planet would be thinking the same things that day, when witnessing the same view. Four? Four thousand? How many people think about these things? The wind picked up and whipped the stray hairs that had managed to free themselves from my ponytail, pushed them into my face.

Three years later, I relived this moment. I was reading The Sheltering Sky while studying in Fes, Morocco. I lay in the cool shade of my small room in the student villa, the baking sunlight entering my shuttered window, heating lines down my back as I lay on my bed with the book. The story floated along, barely keeping my attention, when I came across the following passage:

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

I stopped to re-read the passage once or twice more, then stopped reading entirely and remembered that afternoon in the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains. I have plenty of abstract memories, but that one specific memory was reinvigorated by the passage. Paul Bowles’ words managed to turn an abstract memory of a run in the hills and the sun setting and the moon rising into one of those specific memories, complete with the smell, the feel, the sounds of the place and time. So many other memories will be just as the passage describes- remembered once or twice, perhaps not with much specificity. And even other memories will fade, perhaps never again be recalled.

I wonder if some day I’ll be a ninety one year old grandmother with not much else happening in my cranium but the replaying of a short loop of two or three memories that I recount, repeatedly, to my loved ones when they come to see me. My dear grandmother who passed away this summer was one such grandmother. In her last years of life, our dialogues narrowed from simple discussion down to monologues in which she would tell me the same stories, one after the other. There was the time, about ten years prior, in which she had told her pastor at church that she thanked the lord that she still had good eyesight, that some of her marbles were still working. Her pastor said to her, “Mary, all of your marbles are working.”  This amused her immensely.  Her memory of this particular story and the eventual incessant recounting of it had the sad irony of a homeless man in a tattered business suit.

Then, there was the time when she was in a beauty contest when she was eight years old. She and another girl were finalists, and they both won half the award . . . or something like that. The girl had beautiful blonde hair, my grandmother had beautiful hazel eyes. I wonder sometimes if this memory was actually a dream she had when she was a child which, as her senility set in, became a memory for her. I also wonder what else may have happened in her conversation with her pastor besides the two-sentence exchange. I wonder if they really spoke of “working marbles” or, more likely, of “having marbles.”

By the time she was telling these stories, it was too late to ask her about the facts. Perhaps this is one compelling reason to write now: the stories and memories will be more completely told, will speak for me if the day arrives when all I have left to say are the same few sentences describing an afternoon on a forgotten trail in forgotten mountains with the sun and the moon and the wind.