Down the Rabbit Hole

Where is my brain exactly? Certainly it’s not all squirreled away inside my head hanging out on a deck chair watching the sun go down over the Pacific. Some of it seems to be in 1952 lining up on 82nd street after lunch waiting to march into PS9. Some of it is playing potsy on the sidewalk and falling off the seesaw onto the unforgiving gravel at the playground. Some of it is eating chicken à la king made with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup for dinner and watching “Our Miss Brooks.” It is remembering an artificially lit sit-com kind of childhood with shadows advancing. War in Indochina, Nixon’s return. But some of it is seeing a future where everything dissolves and vanishes like Zanzibar and Yugoslavia. My brain looks around and does not entirely recognize its surroundings. It can’t always be depended upon. 

The other day, I got up in the middle of a plate of massaman curry with tofu to look for a place to pee at Thai Noodle in Placerville. It’s a small restaurant with a take-out counter in front of an open kitchen. To the right, facing the counter, is a short hallway and at the end of the hallway a sign indicating a gender-neutral bathroom. The sign for the bathroom registered on me, but not the gaping hole of the open trap door that covered most of the distance from where I was standing to the bathroom door. Like Yugoslavia, the floor had completely disappeared leaving nothing but the wormy basement storage far below. A fantastic law suit if you like that sort of thing. The small step that I thankfully did not take was the difference between walking on two legs going forward and being profoundly disabled, quite possibly the difference between hearing the noisemakers herald the start of 2024 and not. I was knocking on heaven’s door, but I’m pleased to report no one was home. My brain snapped back into place this time, but again I don’t know if it can be depended upon. It has a mind of its own and is fond of wandering.

Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

When I’m writing, my brain becomes focused, motivated. It gets out there in its pink lycra work-out clothes and does a series of bridges and crunches. The slog and blur of my non-writing life amps up to perform invigorating mental gymnastics. I’ll take it. I am alive, sitting alone in bed or on the couch, inventing a reality that asks to be chaperoned into the world. I’ll take the sense that the words come to me as if I’m snorkeling through schools of fish in and out of rock formations and forests of seaweed. Some words are orange and some are electric blue. I know I can’t chase them. I don’t stand a chance of catching up to them. All I can do is marvel and hope they want to come out and play. This is a wondrous process that I’m very grateful for. But language is not the medium of choice in all situations. If I’m heading for a vast chasm, a hole in the floor, I need to have some kind of muscle memory, some kind of body awareness that is a really different way of apprehending the world.  What if I were in touch with my shoulders reaching out to support my neck, my feet meeting the floor? Just now, sitting in meditation, I experimented with imagining that I was holding two hot rolls, fresh from the oven, one in each hand. I tried this because ironically I’ve been chilled to the bone in California where the climate calls for some adjustments. It seems that my blood is reluctant to travel all the way to my fingertips. It wants to be urged along, encouraged. It wants hot rolls, hold the butter.

If I had greater fluency with non-verbal grammars, the question might no longer be where is my brain exactly but where is my body precisely and how can the two of them go out for a drink? I wonder when the divorce took place, when my brain decided to abandon my body and head off on its own. It may have been at the dawn of sexual awareness in adolescence, but it may have been even earlier. It may have been in the confrontation with sports and games, with teams and competition, when my brain rebelled, swerved off in another direction and chose to take its chances with gaping holes that might swallow it up.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In December, we look forward to a contribution from Carmen Victoria Rossi. Carmen, originally from Puerto Rico, now happily lives in Minneapolis, MN with her rescue dog Reyi. She does not consider herself a writer but loves the solitude, deep reflection and insights that writing offers, same applies to her long walks with Reyi. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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