Hush, Hush

Traveling around this enormous brass band of a country, witnessing each day through the lens of a different family member, a different angle of inclination, I am wide-eyed and strangely speechless. We are all just trying to take care of ourselves and one another, but there are so many ways to go about doing that. The endless possibilities keep streaming towards me like an old-fashioned newsreel, the kind we used to watch between Bugs Bunny and the coming attractions. My niece’s husband in Berkeley who is Black does not wave the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine. He remembers the students from Africa and the Middle East trapped at the beginning of the war, not allowed to flee along with the other refugees. How they were conscripted to fight the marauding Russians and how, if they eventually got out and ended up in Warsaw, they were not welcome there either. My granddaughter in rural northern California has not been vaccinated and will not be sending her children to school. She doesn’t verbalize any particular politics, but a truck parked on the main street of the town where she lives features a Fuck Joe Biden sticker. People there are open to ivermectin. Across the country, there is COPD and dementia and stress in all shapes and sizes. There are birthday cakes, homeless encampments, and Latina girls in flouncy quinciniera gowns. Dogs bark and cats doze. It is more life than I am accustomed to back home in the Berkshires where the people I know are generally aging, genteel retirees with belief systems that occupy a narrow sliver of the progressive political wavelength. Some of us were Elizabeth Warren supporters, others stuck with Bernie. We have all boostered our brains out.

Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash

One family member promotes the health benefits of walking barefoot on the beach, through the woods, to stay in touch with the holiness of the natural world like Moses at the Burning Bush. I overhear myself making a clever remark about ticks. Everyone chuckles but the chuckling interferes with the sanctity of the moment. Where once a spacious encounter with the earth had been offered, now there was dread and its old army buddy, derision. Better to practice deep listening. Better to enter the hushed silence that I’ve seen in my sister who speaks rarely and never without intention, much like our father in his endtime. She and I are more than ten years apart, so she has been here first and knows a thing or two about measuring the dosage of her words with an eyedropper. When I left her yet again last week, I said I thought we were closer now than we had been all those years when I was scrambling to be someone, to catch up with her. She gave me that beatific smile you sometimes get if you play your cards right and nodded at me knowingly. We are sisters and we don’t need to say much about that.

Listening to other people’s conversations without weighing in can be a form of research and a form of prayer. Since exiting the leafy confines of Stockbridge two weeks ago, I have listened to people talking about mortgages, marriage counseling in church, kayaking, high school football, freeway traffic, and bagels. I have seen people laboring to make their lives work. People in their fifties have parents and children to worry about, take-out to pick up. They spend relatively little time in Kyiv or Buffalo. Covid is, for the most part, in the rearview mirror.

Sometimes, over the last few years, I have caught myself feeling marginalized, like an old crone with hearing loss who can’t quite keep up with the conversation. I am accustomed to being heard, dammit. Voicing my treasured opinions on all subjects political, spiritual, literary. But now that can seem like so much wasted breath and breath, after all, is what remains essential. Breath is what I look forward to. Breath is speech without controversy. It occurs to me that this silencing might be a blessing. It might be an opportunity to listen deeply the way a baby listens to her mother’s heartbeat. The way the earth listens to the commotion of the world, but stays underneath the radar in a hushed silence of recognition, the sound that precedes sound. But I wonder today after the slaughter in Texas if there is a difference between that silence, the silence of deep listening, and the numbness I feel since reading about the murdered children in Uvalde. I cried all day after the Newtown school shooting, but I’m not crying today. Why is that?

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