We're all something other than children now

Most nights, I have a good deal of trouble falling asleep. My mind is rather fond of saving all the important thoughts of the day for those first tenuous moments of silence when the lights are turned off, and the pillows cradle my head. It’s then, and almost exclusively then, that each of these separate and complex streams of conscious eagerly emerge from their corners and demand attention. I’m running low on money! I can’t afford those blueberries I bought at the store today! What a blessed idiot you are! I forgot to send that letter to my grandfather again! What if he dies before I get the chance, how will I feel then! I haven’t talked to my friend Tanner in forever, I should make a list of all my friends and call one person on the list every day! I remember jumping off that green bridge in New Hampshire one summer with two of the cutest girls I could find, I posted a picture of it on facebook, and my brother commented ‘tits magee times two!’

Sometimes, in an effort to dissuade these thoughts from stampeding out under cover of darkness and completely engulfing me, I watch a little television before bed. One such night in recent memory, I watched a documentary on illegal immigrants living in Europe. There was a Chechen woman living in Poland with her husband and daughter. They had fled their home when war broke out in their country some years before and lived in a refugee camp with other Chechen refugees. The women all wore bandanas on their heads to cover their hair, the way empowered work-women in the US did in the 1950’s and 60’s. Among the few possessions the woman had brought with her were some photographs of her family in Moscow’s Red Square. The camera peered over her shoulder as she thumbed through them. She spoke a small narrative on each one, pausing on occasion to stroke a picture’s surface gently with her thumb. She spoke Chechnyan, but the subtitles kindly remedied my ignorance of that language. “Those were happy times,” she said, “My parents were alive, there was no war.” Even though I couldn’t understand her words, it was clear in her voice that she was traveling back in time, “It was as though nothing bad could ever happen.”

A few days ago, my roommate suspiciously asked me, “Are you ready?”  Upon inquiring what I might be getting ready for, he gave me this little nugget: “What would you do if your whole life was about to change?”

I appreciate surprises as much as the next guy, but I cannot say that I was terribly excited to start a conversation with that particular phrase. Rather than breaking some awful news to me, he informed me that he and his girlfriend had bought a house, and that they would be moving in to the house in a month. I was shocked because I had not seen it coming. He sped through the details, how they hadn’t really been looking, how a friend at work was involved in loans, how quickly it had all come together once they knew their price range. And I, much like the Chechen woman, found myself slipping back in time. It was fall in New England and the lid of daytime was quickly closing to dusk. My mom and step-dad had packed my brothers and I into the car with the promise of a surprise, and after a very short drive from our rented home, we pulled into the unpaved driveway of a small yellow house. Not the sort of surprise my brothers and I had been expecting. But then we got out of the car and my mom asked us that simple question, “What would you do if your whole life was about to change?” We looked at her nervously, perhaps disappointedly. A moment froze before she freed us, “This house is ours. We own this. We live here now.” I remember running through the back yard, the gigantic back yard! It was on a hill and there was so much space you could roll down that hill into the dark at the bottom and maybe just keep on rolling forever. And there was a stream in the woods in back which was ours, and if it had fish in it, which was the only thing I could ever think about when I was twelve, then we could keep the fish, and they too would be ours. I became drunk with this new sense of ownership, I danced and yelled and fell down and rolled in the grass and looked up at the stars.  The sky and the night, that was ours too.  It was elation, it was pure childish joy. It was our home. Those were happy times. It was as though nothing bad could ever happen.

I came back to reality as my roommate was scrolling through pictures of his new home on the computer, listing off all the amenities and the improvements, he could not hide his excitement. He almost cried, he told me, when he got the call that their bid had been accepted. I can imagine, I told him. I couldn’t say much beyond that. I thought of where he had come from, of the life he had carved, the troubles he had escaped and survived, the future ahead of him. I congratulated him, of course. And then I retreated, back into my own mind, into my room with some shitty paintings I’d done and a hat-rack that I’d built.

He offered to let me move in with him, to keep the rent the same and give me my own bedroom and bathroom. He asked if I could chip in $20 for the moving truck. He asked if I wouldn’t mind using thumbtacks to hang things so there wouldn’t be any big holes in the wall. “Since we own it now” he said.

I haven’t told him yet that I won’t be moving in to the house with him. There’s another month left for that. For now, I want him to roll around in the freshness of his new title as homeowner. He deserves these moments of elation. These are happy times for him.

I will be moving back to Connecticut, I suspect, to live with my mom and oldest brother in a rented 2 bedroom apartment in a town that is not my own. After the divorce, my step-dad stayed in the small yellow house with the gigantic backyard and the stream in the woods. It will be strange to go home to a place that is not my own, not our own. It will be strange because that small yellow house grew over the years into a large yellow house with a pool and a deck and raised ceilings and concrete steps. And though my hand print in those concrete steps is the only one that you can see, nearly every inch of that beautifully-remodeled home has my fingerprints on it.

It’s never easy to give up something that you’ve worked so hard to build, or to leave a place that you’ve spent so much time loving. But you don’t know that it might happen when you first start out. You expect to keep rolling, maybe forever. You expect a stream to be full of fish, and it’s not until much later that you find out its empty. That’s ok, it’s better that way. It gives you the chance to bring something of a place with you when you go, to thumb over it gently in your mind and think, ‘Those were happy times.’

I miss the fall. I don’t just miss the clichéd things, the pumpkins and apples and brightly-colored leaves as they turn – though I do miss those as well. But it’s not just those things; or rather it’s not mostly those things. It’s more precise than that. I can file down my nostalgia to the thin blade of a razor and use it to slice through the thick and tangled years since I last saw the fall.

I miss the gentle squeeze of a favorite sweater over the lightly-browned skin of summer, the catch of a thread on peeling skin. I miss the momentary comfort of a sniffle, the silent pinch of numbness which rises in cheeks blushed with youth. I miss the blurriness of tears summoned by the constant wind, washing the eyes with a fresh vigor and preparing them for a hard winter. Tears summoned not by sadness, but by the simple and exquisite currents of beauty spilling through the fields around you. Tears which bottle the immense beauty and vividness of life, which present the constant truth of change, and which inevitably fall to the earth to restore a measure of that beauty from which they are drawn.  I miss the immutable rustle of tiny feet through crunchy rivers, an elaborate symphony of twigs snapping and leaves cracking beneath the weight of immense good-fortune. I miss scraping the swamp-forest guts of a slightly-misshapen pumpkin into a heavy mountain and then squeezing my fingers through them all, staining my fingernails orange with pumpkin blood. Yes, even now I miss that part of it.

There are some moments in life so indelibly perfect that we never have to grow out of them. They are so innocent and powerful that we shrink ourselves back into the moment whenever we revisit them, instantly dissolving the years between. They are rare, but inevitably they find us later in life. They cleverly hide and then at the tripping of a wire – perhaps a familiar scent or sight – they spring back to life inside of us and we are powerless, ignorant to surroundings or present company. We are transformed back to that moment of discovery, of understanding, of intense comfort, and we succumb entirely. We are lucky to live maybe a dozen such moments in the course of our lives, and yet can recall with eagerness their every minute detail. Who said time travel was impossible?

Glass hummingbirds. I have always have a secret fascination with them. Rare a bird as the hummingbird is, at least to my own eyes, I am happy to capture the fleeting beauty of this simple creature in something as permanent as glass. Funny then, that glass is made from sand - the stuff that perfectly defines impermanence. Bits of shorn rock, broken glass, and battered earth all thrown together by the curiosity of the wind to see them interact. And then melted together and transformed from tiny, ugly separate pieces of the world to one unique and elegant piece of clean crystal. A hummingbird perhaps, if the bits are lucky enough to have that fate.

There was never any choice really when I began my collection of glass hummingbirds, that they would come from the hand of the most pure man I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Being of course human, he was not as pure as the glass that he worked with, but I did not find that out until much later.

The maker of these glass hummingbirds was a man by the name of Gabriel Vizcarra. A man in whose life I was once precariously entwined. The inventive and technical style that Gabriel displayed had never been seen before. The types of works that he created were mercilessly intricate and equally delicate. No apprentice could last with him. He would sometimes spend thirty or more hours on a single piece only to have a person walk into his work room, disrupt the currents of air, and shatter the piece into thousands. Instead of becoming angry or punishing the person, he would sweep the shards together, place them in a tiny metal cup, and thrust the cup back into the kiln that burned continuously in his workshop.

God had never touched another human with the grace and balance and vision that Gabriel had been touched. He told me of dreams he had where the birds came to life, and flew above him in a spiral. Tens of thousands of tiny glass beads, each gently bound to the next with a thread so thin it was almost invisible to the naked eye. They would fly, he told me, in giant swooping waves, breaking the light with each furiously fast wing beat, like a tornado of tiny rainbows in perfect silence above him. And these were the visions he was blessed with, that allowed him to stand for twenty hours at a time, squinting from behind a thin pair of scratched reading glasses, and coax each fleck of molten glass into the gentle stillness of life, to introduce it to that singular bead before and after it, to feel the importance of that connection to the bead beside it. It was the incredibly steady and patient hand, and the calmness in his mind which helped him turn his visions into creations, and helped transform broken pieces of other worlds into one beautiful whole in this world. To me, it seemed he was God himself.

I met Gabriel when I was 29, traveling to South America with the same friend that had brought me the first glass hummingbird, though not originally for the purpose of meeting it’s maker. He was squatting beside a small brightly-colored blanket in Arequipa, peddling the tiny treasures to any person who happened past. When I saw them, I instantly recognized them as kin to the one my friend had brought me many years before. I approached him and asked in broken Spanish where he had gotten them. I made them, he said.

At night the fountain stops flowing and the bubbling volcano of cool water lies quiet. Later, when the world is nestled like mice in their matchboxes, the lights too go to bed. And what’s left, if you’re lucky, is a bathtub of stars. One night I snuck out the back, wedged three miles of footsteps between me and that door, to come to that fountain.

The night was a blanket of sticky forest sounds. You followed behind, cracking twigs with steps as clumsy as the scattering of stars. Come here, I whispered, I’ll show you a trick. You sat by my side, laced your fingers in mine, and placed your heart in our hands. Careful as anything, I’ll always remember, we dipped our hands in the dark purple soup, felt the rush of the cold. Your heart bucked faster, you smiled and said ‘A skinny-dip for the soul.’ But that’s not the trick, I told you, watch this.

Together we lifted our basket of fingers, filled the fountain again with a trickle of sound. With your heart back safe in your chest, I showed you the spell. The reflection of stars in the water clung to our palms, made them shine with both blackness and freckles of white. You laughed in delight as I whispered, ‘What a beautiful evening we have on our hands. From the sky to the water to our hands to our lips, a sparkle’s journey ends with a kiss.’

Again your fingers hugged mine, but this time hundreds of galaxies swirled on the tips of those fingers. We felt them collide. Then you played a trick of your own, though I’ll never know how. Obvious thief of the stars, you had tucked them inside the tiny endless universe of your forgiving brown eyes.

Crossing that rickety wood-and-rope bridge from the vestibule of youth to the precipice of middle age, I have realized something astonishing: As we age, everything shrinks. The places that seemed so great, so huge in comparison to us, have in time grown smaller. The edges of our back yards squint in a few millimeters each year, it seems. The slope of the yard, which at 7 seemed a veritable mountain when sledding in winter, now is nearly flat and perplexingly short. The roof on gram’s house which before was a struggle to summit is now like a step-ladder in the kitchen. Indeed, my grandparents themselves are getting smaller, slipping down the rabbit hole while I continue to grow and outgrow all of this past.

Their yard still bares the scar of our many whiffleball seasons, but the field now is small as a bathtub. I can’t imagine two whole people being able to hit a ball and run around and chase each other. We must have been tiny as mice back then.

The falls, though, is something of an exception. It’s one of the few places that still strikes fear in me, standing briefly at the top ledge of rock before hurling 40 feet into the cold water below. It’s the same, I swear, as when i jumped off it the first time - way back when I was still apt to get in trouble for doing it!

That’s one of the reasons it has been so hard for me to accept the fact that the world is coming to an end. Because in my town there is a place made simply of jagged stones and fresh water and the inexorable pull of gravity. There is a patch of summer sky always when I think of the place, hiding then peeking from behind ephemeral swathes of pure white clouds. Here, the world isn’t getting smaller, it isn’t getting more polluted, and it isn’t dying. It’s barely even getting more crowded, even after decades of steadily flowing in its innocent beauty.

Almost everyplace else on the tumbling blue marble of earth is exploding, whether into flames or into development. As we grow, so too does the damage we inflict upon our precious planet. As we get bigger, the clean canvas of the sky and the great stretch of the horizon both shrink. And we must take great care, that we do not outgrow each of those yawning frontiers, lest they shrink from existence and we are left in the utter blackness of space, wondering how we all once fit on that tiny speck of tumbling blue marble.