A TIMELESS MOMENT OR A MOMENT IN TIME

Sometimes in dreams I will go back to a particular moment in time when the world seemed so perfect and beautiful that it brought a smile to my lips and tears to my eyes. These might be actual dreams, from which I awaken sad to have come out of the trance and desperately wanting to close my eyes and go back. Or they might simply be waking daydreams, where, for a moment I lose track of current reality and time-travel back to that exact instant and place.

What’s important about this is that the moment itself isn’t a dream. It is very real. It existed in real life, and exists still, if only in my mind. I consider myself fortunate that there have been more than one. Although, at the same time, it makes me sad that I haven’t been able to maintain a level of self-awareness that might have provided me with many more of these special moments, which are the only real definition of complete happiness.

These were times when I was momentarily blind to the crime, violence and dirt of the streets, and to the major problems of the world. They were moments in which all I was aware of was myself and my commitment to the path that I was choosing. It still happened to me, very occasionally, in my early years as a journalist, despite my job’s leading me to witness harsh, often even brutal realities on a daily basis. Perhaps back then I was more able to compartmentalize, to keep the reality that I was reporting separate from my own. Maybe it was even a survival mechanism. Who knows?

That’s probably why as I’ve gotten older and, hopefully, world-wiser, these moments have become, sadly, ever more rare. It’s that I no longer seem able to separate myself from the world I live in. And, search for them though I might, those moments of pure joy and self-realization are rendered practically unattainable, or at least they are no longer unadulterated.

I recall these special moments as timeless instances in which there came a sensation that everything around me was mere scenery that could be just as beautiful as I wanted to make it, and that, just beyond it, in a place I couldn’t quite touch or see, only sense, there was something else. Something more.   

Epiphany. I think that’s probably the word for it. A moment of lightning-bolt realization. An instant stripped of doubt, sorrow, regret, rage or cynicism. A moment of simply being, and knowing that that, in itself, is enough. That it’s a miracle. Life is. Being alive, breathing in and out, seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, loving, that it’s all cause for indescribable joy. For a fleeting moment in time, you might capture it. You hold it in your heart and mind and it fills you. And then it’s gone. But not forgotten. It is branded on your heart and brain and, if you’re lucky, from time to time, it will come back and let you recall it as if it were a snapshot or a video that plays over in your mind, but one that includes more than image. Emotion, feeling, state of mind, all just like they were right then. It’s primitive, unbridled, so simple

Henry Miller -- literary epiphany

and pure that it’s an enigma.

For author Henry Miller, for instance, that sort of moment was eminently literary. In Black Spring, Miller writes:

“And then one day, as if suddenly the flesh came undone and  the blood beneath the flesh had coalesced with the air, suddenly the whole world roars again and the very skeleton of the body melts like wax. Such a day it may be when first you encounter Dostoievski. You remember the smell of the tablecloth on which the book rests; you look at the clock and it is only five minutes from eternity, you count the objects on the mantelpiece because the sound of numbers is a totally new sound in your mouth, because everything new and old, or touched and forgotten, is a fire and a mesmerism. Now every door of the cage is open and whichever way you walk is a straight line toward infinity...It was exactly five minutes past seven, at the corner of Broadway and Kosciusko Street, when Dostoievski first flashed across my horizon...”

Harper Lee -- a new angle

For Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, that moment of epiphany is experiencing something that causes you to view a world you’ve known all your life from a different angle, and as if seeing it for the first time. She paints that instant through the words of her child protagonist, Scout Finch, when the little girl, as narrator, says, “I turned to go home. Street lights winked down the street all the way to town. I had never seen our neighborhood from this angle. There were Miss Maudie's, Miss Stephanie's—there was our house, I could see the porch swing—Miss Rachel's house was beyond us, plainly visible. I could even see Mrs. Dubose's... Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”

Scout --the world from the Radley porch

My moments of wonder have been much more pedestrian, if just as epiphanous. The first one I can recall happened when I was still a boy, an adolescent of sixteen. It was Christmas-time. I was from Wapakoneta, but nearby Lima, Ohio, had become “my town”. In our rural area, Lima was what passed for “the city”, a big industrial town back then, with an urban feel to it.

No one could have told me even a few months earlier that I would be where I was right then. I had been a drummer in a couple of “kid bands” that played in teen centers for a small cut of the meager cover charge. But then I got a part-time job working in Lima’s biggest music store and my whole life changed. Suddenly, I was in daily contact with all of the professional jazz musicians in the area and at sixteen, was playing as a relief drummer every Friday and Saturday night for at least union scale. It was a dream come true to still be in high school and to be working as a professional musician, a percussion instructor and a respected member of the staff at the music store. I knew every bar and nightclub with live music in the area. And I knew all of the best area musicians by name and was treated like one of them. I had my own car. I had my own money. I had my own life, even though I was still in high school.

The Lima Square by night

It was around Christmas-time of that first wonderful year of dreams come true. The changes had opened up a whole new view of the year ahead. I was inspired to not only play every gig I could but also to give free rein to my other artistic endeavor by starting to take my writing seriously. And, therefore, to also take my reading seriously.  By the end of that year, the future I foresaw was as writer by day, musician by night, in a dream world that couldn’t get any better.

The special moment in time came one night when I was working at the store until nine. I had just been on my supper break. I had walked up Main across the Lima square and half a block up to Gregg’s Department Store, where they had a restaurant I liked on the upper floor. I’d had the ham steak with mashed potatoes with sides of green beans and slaw, washed down with iced tea. And while I ate, I finished reading, for the first time, what was to become one of my favorite short stories of all time—J.D. Salinger’s For Esmé With Love and Squalor.

When I came out, with Salinger’s words still ringing in my ears, the cold had turned sharp as a knife and the sky was mostly clear. Still, snow flurries were falling from some unseen cloud, since, overhead, the sky was infinity-black and dotted with glittering stars. The square was dressed for the holidays, with twinkling colored lights, wreaths, fantasy candy canes and bright red, green and gold ribbons everywhere. And in the middle there was a huge tree with magical lights, silver icicles and oversized ornaments to delight shoppers. Woolworth’s, Penney’s,  Sears, The Leader, Gregg’s and other downtown department stores glistened with holiday cheer, and on the corner, out in front of George Anthony’s Sweetland candy store, coffee shop and restaurant, a group of my newfound colleagues had formed a brass choir and were playing Christmas carols with that sweet, clear, harmonic brass sound that is like no other.

Between tunes they were passing a flask to keep warm and as I went by, one of them called out, “Hey kid!” and held up the flask offering me a snort. I laughed, thanked them and politely refused. And then, as I reached the other side of the square and headed south toward the store, I suddenly felt tears well up in my eyes and the thought that came to me was, “This might well be the happiest moment of my life.”  

As an adult, I remember a New Year’s in Buenos Aires. Virginia and I had invited a number of people to our Mid-town apartment to ring in the New Year. We’d held the celebration at home. I was off from the paper, since the next day was one of only a handful of non-publishing days each year, so I was completely relaxed. Lots of friends and some of Virginia’s relatives showed up, many after they had started bidding the old year farewell elsewhere. There was a surfeit of food and drink and good music on the stereo, and it had been a really fun time, capped by all of us standing together on our eighth-floor terrace, watching a plethora of fireworks burst in dazzling colors above the rooftops.

Then about two or three in the morning, people started peeling off a person or a couple at a time and heading for home. At last, it was just us with a couple with whom we had become intimate friends. They lived upstairs then, and we saw each other several times a week, sometimes daily, and dined together and went out together and took vacations together. We had become like family. Or like something more than family. We truly loved each other.

When everyone else had gone, our friends suggested we go downtown and get a nightcap—champagne, he was buying. So I got my car out of the parking lot around the corner and off we went, east toward the river and downtown along Avenida Corrientes. Partying was still underway in a lot of private homes, but from Mid-town to Downtown, traffic was sparse and many places were already closed, closing or had never opened. It was a rare thing, something almost magical to see the city so abandoned on a warm South American summer’s night.

New Year's fireworks in Buenos Aires...a few hours later the

streets were deserted.

Stranger still was to see the ever busy Avenida Nueve de Julio, the city’s main north-south downtown thoroughfare, practically bereft of traffic. There along that main drag, we found a place that was still open. The refuse of year-end revelers was everywhere, but the fireworks were over with. The place looked jaded and its weary owners less than happy to see us. A little way down the street, a couple were sitting on the pavement, their backs to the front wall of a building, a liter bottle of beer on the sidewalk between them. She was leaning against his shoulder, looking a little the worse for wear, but he was still going strong, strumming the hell out of a box guitar and bellowing out the lyrics of every folk tune he could remember, his voice echoing in the deep canyon of Nueve de Julio where it cleaved a broad swath through the midst of towering buildings. There was no traffic to drown the singer out and he was making the most of this improvised amphitheater.

Inside the bar they were already cleaning up, but our friend talked the owner into letting us sit at one of the tables outside on the sidewalk, and into sending out a bottle of chilled champagne. Suddenly, what might have been the sordid scene of celebration’s end seemed mystical. As if the city were ours alone, with only the scraping guitar and rasping voice to entertain us, as we sipped ice-cold champagne under cones of light from the street lamps, in the grey glint of a sultry summer’s dawn. For perhaps an hour, the four of us sat there joking and laughing and just enjoying being together, putting aside our individual and collective worries and letting trust, love and cold champagne set the mood. By the time we drove back to Mid-town, we had the shimmering streets of Buenos Aires practically to ourselves.

Back home again, I dropped Virginia and our friends at the door of our building. I left the motor running and got out of the car with them. We all hugged and truly meant and felt it, warm as only love can be. Then I went alone to take the car back to the parking lot. It was as I was coming out of the lot that the sun suddenly broke above the horizon and flooded the street around me with the golden-orange first light of a summer day.

I turned to face it, closed my eyes and felt its warmth on my eyelids. My breath caught and a knot formed in my throat. I was completely, unequivocally grateful. It was a new year. I was writing daily for a living, I was married to the woman I loved, I was in the company of friends with whom we shared an almost passionate relationship, and a whole future of promise seemed to be stretching before me. A future that was mine for the taking.

It was a moment of almost uncontainable joy, and one that I would remember forever, even in the hardest of times.

THE EXPATRIATE’S COMPLAINT—OUT OF PLACE AND OUT OF TIME

The expatriate lives in a world of dichotomy. You’re always torn between the land of your birth and the country or countries where you live by choice or by destiny. Your heart tells you to see things from the perspective of the place that will always be your birth right and the culture that you suckled at your mother’s breast. But cold observation and logic will teach you to also see the world and your native country from a neutral, objective viewpoint and to understand how others see you and yours. And depending on your personality, you’ll either be humbly apologetic or obnoxiously arrogant about it. 

You’ll never feel completely at home in either world. No matter how long you live where you live abroad, no matter how many decades, you will always be a foreigner to the natives, but more importantly, to yourself. You may congratulate yourself on how well you’ve adapted, how well you speak the language, how well you fit in. But it will always be that—fitting in, adapting, camouflaging yourself as something you’re not. And no matter how good you get at it, it won’t take long in a conversation, with those who are born and bred, for you to be found out and fingered as a stranger, even if as a warmly welcomed one.

Unless you consistently seek to keep abreast of the evolution or decline of the place from which you came, you will see your original home in a picture that is frozen in time. It becomes a museum piece. Especially after your most referential figures have faded away and you become the generation that your parents and grandparents were before you. And every time you return “home”, you won’t try to find out what has changed but will seek to confirm what has remained the same, because that’s what makes you feel “at home”.

You’ll bristle when others tell you that you’re being naïve, that things are nothing like they used to be. And are they ever better? Not likely. It seems they never are. You will want them to be, though, because they are a big part of who you were before you became who you are today. You’ll look, as in a dream, for glimpses of your past, for fragments that tend to reaffirm “who you are.”  You’ll walk once familiar streets trying to remember what used to be there, attempting to see in your mind’s eye the building that once stood where there is now a parking lot, the department store that’s now a thrift shop, the tavern that’s now a set of law office, the rambling old house where your grandparents lived and that, for the past forty years or so, only continues to exist in your memory and in your heart.

You’ll yearn to bump into people who are long since dead but who live on in your mind, just as they were. Or to meet up with classmates whose adolescent images have remained timeless in your memory so that you probably wouldn’t recognized them if they passed you on the street—just as you no longer recognize the reflection that stares back at you in the mirror while you shave.

No matter how long you live abroad, you will have moments of terrible longing to be “back home”. But when you go there for a visit, you’ll find that you no longer fit in completely, that you’re treated as “a guest”, that your vision is another one, at once familiar yet foreign. And should you decide to go back and stay for a time, you’ll find that it feels more like a holiday than a homecoming and that you can no longer be in one place without missing the other.

You’ll also have regrets. You’ll be grateful for the time spent with parents and siblings and life-long friends when you were back on always too short visits. But you’ll mourn the times you weren’t there, the life-events you missed, the comfort you failed to give, the always thinking there would be more time, another visit, a new homecoming, when those reunions were never to be.

Expats are destined, then, never to be quite satisfied, never to be quite happy, always to be out of place and time.

That sensation of “not belonging” is heightened when you journey from one hemisphere to another, because even the seasons are opposite. I was thinking about that on this blustery spring morning in Patagonia. I was remembering that October was the month that my mother, Reba Mae, loved best, because she loved the autumn. And in Ohio, September can still be somewhat summery and winter can come early in November. But October is the quintessential month of autumn.

Reba Mae talked in October about “sweater weather”, and about “bright blue October skies”. She loved the sweet, tobacco-like smell of the fallen leaves on the damp ground, and she missed the incense smell of the dead leaves burning along the curbs in town before burning was banned and people started having to bag or mulch what they raked.

But mostly, she loved the fall colors of October, the fiery reds and yellows, as if the maples were aflame, the soft yellow hue of the cottonwoods, the rich red-brown of the oaks. “No matter how good you were,” she used to say, “you couldn’t paint this. A camera can’t even do it justice. It’s just breathtaking!”

Sometimes we would take a ride out in the country on an October Sunday, gasping, ooing and aahing at the flaming colors of the woodlots, while Whitie, my dad, stayed home, snoozing on the couch and pretending to watch the ballgame. Reba Mae’s voice would tremble when she would say, “I feel so sorry for your father. He just doesn’t seem to see any beauty in anything. I think he would feel so much less depressed if he could just learn to love nature, to stop and look at all this, to let it into his heart.”

Later in life, after a great deal of psychiatry, anti-depression drugs and help with what doctors call his “chemical imbalance”, Whitie got so that he would go on walks or go places now and then with Reba Mae, where nature was particularly prevalent. By then he had learned that being able to see your surroundings and be awed by them and grateful was a sign of sanity and that failure to perceive beauty was a symptom of mental illness. He was nothing if not smart in this way. And so he might stand watching a sunset briefly and then say, “Boy, that’s pretty!” And if this failed to elicit a response from Reba Mae, Whitie would nudge her with his elbow and say, “Ain’t it, ‘Mau’? Ain’t it?”

It was as if to say, “See how I’m seeing it? See how I notice things now?”

And Reba Mae would stand there with a lump in her throat watching the sun go down, fighting back tears, and thinking that she’d give anything for him to believe what he was saying and to feel it the way she did.

Over the years I’ve learned to celebrate Christmas in eighty-five-degree heat with a cold buffet and chilled cider and champagne. Or not to celebrate it at all.  I’ve learned that we can have one of the worst snowfalls of the year on July Fourth. I know that the first day of spring is September 21^st and although the secretaries in Buenos Aires are anxious to wear their new spring outfits, as the day ends you can usually see them carrying a spray of flowers that they’ve received at work to celebrate the onset of the season of love while they shiver at the bus stop in the persistent winter chill.

But October will always be autumn for me, no matter where I am in time and space. And it will always belong to Reba Mae.