There is No Place I'm Going To

I came down with covid yesterday after traveling west into the heartland, a vagueness and fatigue descending on me as I returned to the urban buzz after a day in farm country. It had been so still there. Time out of time. Getting sick kept me in that stillness. The landscape in southwest Minnesota has the flavor of mortality before you even get to face the fact of it. It’s flat and endless like the afterlife. Corn, and maybe soy, is cut down for the winter on both sides of the two-lane road. There’s nothing but horizon with a sprinkling of barns and silos and the silos are strangely short and squat by East coast standards. Maybe it’s because the familiar tall New England ones might just blow over in the fierce winds that sweep across the plains. When you’re driving at 70 mph out there, you have to slow down every now and then for a town that pops up out of nowhere.  The town will have a post office, a gas station, a couple of churches, maybe a place to grab a sandwich or a beer. The closest I’ve ever been to a place like this before is in Plainsong or Benediction, one of those Kent Haruf novels set in eastern Colorado. An unpunctuated place that just goes on and on. In the town of Lucan. I went to the funeral of a local man, a cabinet maker and fisherman, who had married into my Minnesota family some five years ago. He and his wife made their home in Bloomington, right by the Mall of America, but he went back to Lucan to settle in for the long haul in an urn that he made in his own shop. “Look,” his widow said to me. “He was born just the other side of those trees. A mile and a half away. He could walk home.” 

Photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash

In the Lutheran church, the widow, one of ten children, sat with her two remaining siblings and quite a few of the thirty-two cousins in the next generation. The sermon washed over me. The Father, the Son, the Resurrection, God’s love. It was a different brand of soap, not the usual kind wrapped in paper with Hebrew lettering, but the story was the same. A man had lived and died. A man had labored and loved and he was a good man. I knew him and I can attest to that. Arrangements were made. It got me to thinking about my own arrangements which felt unwieldy, tangled and sloppy. Nothing for me was small-town fixed. Everything was in flux, noisy and uneven like the fire escapes on the tenements of the great city. I would not be buried a mile and a half from where I had been born. I would not walk home through Central Park, past the carousel and the zoo and on down 83rd street to Broadway. 

The fact is, I always thought I’d be buried with Frank in the cemetery in Stockbridge. This place, so verdant and overhung with giant trees, filled with moss-covered 18th century gravestones marking the burial places of members of distinguished New England families and less distinguished friends of mine, was home. If we had ended up there, we would not have had to walk anywhere. But we will not end up there. We are still a work in progress, trying to figure out our future, individually and together. There always seems to be a new piece to the puzzle. 

Sometimes when we’re not talking about the last picture show, we talk about our earlier travels…Tobago, Italy, Portugal, Costa Rica, Panama, Paris and London. Most of the memories center on food and art, our two great preoccupations. Crab and dumpling in a village in the tropics. The Byzantine mosaics in the cathedral in Ravenna. The palaces of Sintra. The native people coming down out of the coffee plantations at the end of the day. Rodin’s erotic drawings. The great world embracing us and letting us loose to eat fried street food buffeted by throngs of black and brown former subjects of the Empire. It has been more than enough for one life, but it makes me wonder if all that commotion, all that calypso makes it more difficult to find a place of deep rest at the end. 

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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 November, we look forward to a contribution from psychotherapist, writer, photographer, and printmaker Peggy Braun. Beginning in October, all subscribers will be able 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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