Foreseeable Futures
Though she doesn’t say so, doesn’t have to say so, my musician-wife savors life. Wakes up ready to make coffee, thinking, “What’s for breakfast?” Later, “What’s for lunch?” and then, “What’s for dinner?” Among the many things that please her, there’s playing piano for hours at a time (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, a jazz version of Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird”); Afro-Cuban dance classes; Tahitian dance classes; cooking; hiking with a friend. Also, shopping for clothes or gear at very low, bargain prices.
One recent dawn, as I paused in front of the Berkeley cottage about to start my slow morning walk, my wife jogged down the street wearing her new backpack. Off to San Francisco on BART for a hike and a run at Land’s End—training for a half-marathon. Then a stop at the Museum of Modern Art. Planning to bring back lunch for us from the Ferry Building before getting ready to go teach.
One’s wife jogging down the street. Standing still, noting how fast the distance between us grew, I watched as she disappeared from view. Reflected for a moment or two on disappearings.
The process of my wife going down the street and out of sight transpired at a pace far faster than I can currently move, a pace at which I used to be able to run without effort. I was both happy for my wife’s happiness and…not melancholic, but…pensive. Contemplating the difference between my now and my how-it-used-to-be; contemplating what might be ahead. That my wife has—gods willing—far more life ahead of her than I do. That I’ve been able to care for her in difficult times, probably won’t be able to do so if and when.
Just a moment of watching my wife disappear. Seeing her one instant, not seeing her the next.
Another day. Heading out for one of my daily walks. “I’ll be right back,” I call to my wife. “See you soon.”
Not so very long ago, a tenth wedding anniversary, then a fifteenth: each observed quietly, just the two of us. And? Another ten years, another five?
Even after this time together, my wife still wonders how it happened to happen. Again asks, “Why us?”
Fair question. Some 7.7 billion humans on Earth? Born in cities 8,000 air miles apart? Born into different languages, different language “families”? Not to mention intricacies of male / female dating & mating, cohabitation, householding. Differing sleep cycles. Age differences. Perhaps the odds were against us. But, somehow, we’ve been—not proven to be, but have seemed—compatible, well suited. A good match. So far.
As I wrote in Here and Gone, one of my wife’s wicked “solutions” to the question of “Why us?” has been to describe our past life. We’re together because we were together before. Of course manifested as different selves then, in different roles. Stipulate that way back when she was (far) more in charge.
Not that we’re talking only former lives. There’s also the next life, even what my wife terms “the next-next” life. How long it may take, you see, for me to regain, say, my musician’s chops so we can perform together.
Do you wonder if I believe in previous lives or ones to come. Do I imagine a moment my wife and I encounter each other, hug, as in an old movie, say, “Darling, it’s been ages.”
And does she? Well, frankly, as the politicians in Washington can’t not say when they’re about to misrepresent or deceive, frankly I try to keep an open mind. And not just for domestic tranquility.
Two thoughts:
1. My wife is very good at teasing, masterful at keeping a straight face.
2. How disprove, for instance, reincarnation?
Though “Why us?” has yet to cost either of us any sleep, I have my own take on the issue. No doubt it’s professional bias, but I’ve suggested to my wife that what’s important is what we’ve made of our fifteen-plus years together. That is, story we’ve been telling ourselves. Are telling ourselves. Story we’ve become, though I remind her that even in just this one life it’s not final.
Story we’re still becoming? Making my point, I’m careful not to mention, say, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
So: heading out the front door. “See you soon,” I call.
And, I’ve said to my wife more than once, when we’ve encountered yet another health problem of mine, having to discuss eventualities: “After I’m gone…”
And, something she’s said, but only a few times. “After you’re gone…”
Moloka‘i
Honolulu. Break of day. Again this small beach. Ghost crabs, low tide, nearly spent waves. Ocean: living and breathing membrane shore to horizon. My church and office. Writer, alchemizing water into words.
So many years here. Time keeps passing. A few years ago, more heart trouble. My surf buddy, a doctor, asked, “Do you want to live until you’re eighty-five?” Arguing, “If you don’t get a second opinion, you might die anytime.” But to live if things get worse? When things get worse?
More than forty years ago, morning twilight at my church and office, I’d nod hello to a woman “getting on in years.” Or “showing her age,” as people also put it in my Boston childhood. Or, they’d say, “She lived to a ripe old age.” Ripe, but as with fruit, suggesting a trend toward overripe.
Or, back in the day, someone “dropped dead.” “Keeled over.” Keeled! I was in my twenties on an oceangoing sailing vessel before I saw the noun inside the verb. Visualized a hull, capsized ship.
But about that frail elder before sunrise: “wrinkled as sea-sand and old as the sea,” as poet Edith Sitwell wrote. Very short, stooped, recently widowed. Given her struggles with the slippery stairs, down from the seawall and back up after each brief swim, her several daily visits to this small beach seemed strongly motivated. Admirable; compulsive. As, two times a day / day after day / every single day I’d head out to surf—admirably; compulsively?—I wondered how often this woman had to enter the ocean.
How often? Just often enough to stay afloat, I concluded.
Afloat. Now, more than forty years later, for me today it’s not riding waves. Knees aching, no popping up off the board as I take the drop. Instead, a very slow swim out the channel to the reefs. Then past surfers lifting and falling during the lulls, carving waves when the next set arrives. Into open ocean.
First swim of the day, second with the goatfish at sunset. Black bathing suit. Black neoprene cap for shaved head, black two-millimeter-thick, long-sleeved wetsuit jacket: wind chill, blood gettin’ thinner. Goggles. No fins. No “Australian crawl” as we called it on frigid New England lakes when I was a skinny, shivering, blue-lipped child. No crawl, just a calm and steady breaststroke. Pull, glide, kick; breath in, breath out. Breath autopilot set to, setting itself to ON.
Hypnotic. Beyond intent. Might this be what positive spirits term “aquatic mindfulness meditation”? Concentration / serenity / bliss?
Nope. No dry-land therapies, please. Is the deep blue not indifferent, unsentimental, without memory? In the ocean, one has to consent to surrender.
On land, one usually moves on the stable horizontal, not aware of even worms just underneath. Terra firma. On this mirrored surface, however, it’s inescapable there’s much going on right below—the mostly unseen, often imminent.
Water can also break up anything structured, anything not in the moment. Regressing you back to what Mircea Eliade called “the undifferentiated mode of pre-existence.”
Sometimes, when I’ve returned to shore, shedding cap and goggles in the shallows, wetsuit jacket intimating commitment to strenuous immersion, someone asks how far I went. I could say, “A half hour or so outbound,” though I’ve never timed it. Wearing a watch in the water? No. Machine time versus dream time. It’s not that time doesn’t pass either way, but humans have lived most of the species’ existence without timepieces. Without time measured in pieces.
Nonetheless, it’s out toward the interface of sea and sky far enough to, but only so far as to—reflexively / inadvertently / prudently—remember (?) to turn around. Though who’s doing the remembering, or, what part of who, is unclear.
At last, approaching the beach, taking a rest. On my back. Afloat. Looking up: moon; frigate bird; two fairy terns; planet. Occasional rainbow sign. Double rainbow. “Between the earth and sky, thought I heard my Savior cry,” goes the spiritual.
But how or why convey any of this to someone who asked only, “How far did you go?” As novelist Bernard Malamud responded to an interviewer’s interrogative, “What is the question asking?”
“How far did you go?” I’m tempted to reply, sometimes do reply, “Moloka‘i.”
This archipelago. Eight islands; atolls, islets, seamounts. Fifteen hundred miles SE to NW across the Tropic of Cancer, from 154°40’ to 178°25’ W longitude and 18°54’ to 28°15’ N latitude.
If the askers don’t know much about where they are, they nod assent, like mariners receiving their bearings. But if a fisherman, surfer, sailor, or waterman does the asking, and I say Moloka‘i? We laugh. From this coast to the island of Moloka‘i is more than thirty miles. “Going to Moloka‘i was tough,” I like to add, “but coming back was a nightmare.”
Channels: growing up, I imbibed something about bounded bodies of water. Nantucket Sound, and, Over There, the English Channel, Strait of Gibraltar. But not, back then, the Moloka‘i Channel. Or, its Hawaiian name, the Kaiwi Channel.
A brutal swim, Moloka‘i to O‘ahu, though not impossible. For great water athletes with escort vessels carrying food, lubricants, and safety gear, it’s twelve, fifteen, or seventeen hours at the shortest crossing’s twenty-six miles. With, predictably, ferocious winds and currents, high surf, stinging jellyfish, tiger sharks, and, as sweetener, volcanic ash—vog—to impair breathing.
As for swimming from O‘ahu to Moloka‘i? Seems only two remarkable swimmers have ever carried it off. Not, even, yours truly. Just a running joke. Like telling basketball–junkie friends who know better that, regrettably, I can no longer dunk. As if I ever could.
Thus my own private Moloka‘i until not long ago, after open heart-surgery back at age seventy. I pause to acknowledge my surprise yet again writing this number. Seventy; 70. But I’d survived the operation, heart-lung bypass machine allowing my heart and lungs to be still for…a few hours. Truly extracorporeal! Gifted surgeon splitting my sternum. Professing himself not miniaturist but minimalist: small-as-possible incision facilitating recovery.
And then, several years later, total knee replacement. Brilliant techniques and technology. Rehab strenuous, some healing, but then setbacks. Chronic pain, that euphemism. I was in bed, bedridden, rider of my bed. “Haggard rider,” I’d tell myself, remembering Sir Henry Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines, a childhood favorite. Some play on words! I was majoring in self-pity, minoring in misery.
If you live long enough, you learn there are lines you once read that stayed right with you. Set in a prison in Stalin’s gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle was first published in English in 1968. In the novel, mathematician Nerzhin remembers a proverb: “You don’t drown in the sea, you drown in a puddle.” Post-surgery, that was me all over. Drowning in a puddle.
Back in my forties, thinking of Queequeg’s canoe-coffin in Moby Dick, and reading about a retired seventy-two-year-old who died surfing, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad way to go. Out on the waves one day during a surfer’s funeral as ashes were strewn and leis placed, I imagined being cycled and recycled in the tropics. To return as warm rain.
But now, bedridden, rider of my bed? Poet Marianne Moore came to mind. “The sea is a collector,” she wrote. And, “the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.”
I thought also of Tennyson’s Ulysses, ship at the dock, setting out “to Sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.”
And I recalled Ahab’s melodramatic exchange with his first mate in Moby Dick: “Some men die at the ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old—shake hands with me, man.”
Bedridden. When my wife, checking on me, would read my grim mood, she’d inquire, “What are you grinding on?” Not that I was up for being interrogated. Too much to say, too much that couldn’t be said.
One day, however, channeling Ahab, I came up with, “I’m going out with the tide.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” my wife asked, reasonably enough.
I took some time. “Moloka‘i,” I responded.
Though my wife has spent much of the last decade in Hawai‘i with me, her time is not in the moana, ocean, but hiking in the Ko‘olau Range. Or at her halau—Tahitian dance school with its kumu, teacher. This dancing: on dry land but waves! cascades! torrents! of relentless drumming. Layered frenzied pitch chattering, impelling the dancers’ shaking / rotating / gyrating hips and pelvises. She’s determined to improve her fa’arapu, ami, and ruru. And oh, the regret of not having started as a child! My musician-wife also studying the percussion, sometimes herself one of the halau’s drummers.
“So what about Moloka‘i?” a Tahitian dance zealot asks a querulous husband. For her, Moloka‘i is an island we’ve yet to visit.
Another pause. Choosing my words. “I’m going to swim to Moloka‘i.”
“And?” my wife said, trying to move the exchange along.
Though I wasn’t myself, lately—not hardly—she’d assumed I knew what I’m doing in the ocean. It was my thing. Always had been, she gathered. Also, given how curt and ill-tempered I’d been, if I said I was going to swim to Moloka‘i, then, very well, I was going to swim to Moloka‘i.
I was tired of withholding.
“I’m going to swim to Moloka‘i,” I told my wife, “but no way I’m going to make it.”
Thomas Farber has been a Fulbright Scholar, awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and three times National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. His recent books include Penultimates, Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, and The Beholder. Former visiting writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai‘i, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. www.thomasfarber.org