The Hanging Tree. Eldorado Springs Canyon, Colorado, 2013
We plan…but Life usually has other ideas…The years go by, then comes the excessive hair in the ears and nose. Paunch on the belly and hips. Wrinkles on the neck and around the lips. A gray hair…or many.The ears and nose don’t stop growing, you know?
Over 50, then gout and lower back issues…A parent in assisted living, just down the hall from the nursing home.
The 50-something gouty man–the son–pushes the wheelchair of a dignified, tired, funny, injured, and sometimes bitter man–the aging father. Isn’t it strange how we enter as children and we leave as children?
Fifty yards ahead, waiting with her art, is a woman the gouty man once loved and still loves, in a way…As to the aging man in the wheelchair, he loves her as the daughter he never had.
And then everything happens at once.
At the same time, two miles to the north, lives the mother of the gouty man and the ex-wife of the aging man in the wheelchair…She has forgiven, but he hasn’t…The gouty son just wants to let go of it all. Life is too short and getting shorter rapidly.
At the same time, 400 yards to the south, is a dusty gravel lot overlooking the dry weeds of a wide, dry wash…a solitary place where the gouty man went to cry some 15 years ago. Or was it longer?
At the same time, the radio chimes with NPR’s Weekend Edition theme…a theme that he learned well before he even knew what gout was and before he bought scissors for the nose hairs…The radio jingle reminds him of her relaxing on the floor in their small apartment in the South, and thinking they just saw three cars with one headlight within just ten minutes…before those great adventures in Berlin and Argentina. Was that…a lifetime ago?
At the same time, 200 miles to the west, another woman, another artist, his first real love, prepares to trade pins at the art symposium. He loved her, too, during those wonderful clear days in the clean Arizona sun, Joni Mitchell on the cassette, before the gout, before the nose hair…Your ears keep growing, did you know? Maybe he still loves her, too, in a way. Even after all these years.
At the same time, 1000 miles to the north, his current love. Also an artist. (Dang, all three artists! What’s with that?) He has cast his lot–gout, nose hairs, and all–with her, despite her faults…and despite his own faults. He loves her. And they will likely live the rest of their days together. He will return to her in just a few days…
But first he needs to push the aging man in the wheelchair toward the waiting embrace of his daughter, that is, his ex-daughter-in-law.
Inside him, it was all happing at once.
Once you love, can you really completely stop loving? Do you not leave a part of you behind, that stays forever connected?
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