. Spinning .

We sometimes rush through the story to read the ending. Sometimes we’re satisfied, sometimes we’re not. The need for a conclusion, yet we never read nor talk about the ending of a life unless a need that overwhelms becomes the goal.

Every morning, a turkey vulture flies over my house. I thank him, and I think. We need to explore, we need to manipulate the life to reach the death. We need to think about it. I’m watching people die, some slow, some quickly. Futures measured out in somewhat concrete terms. What space will be traversed as well in increments? What insight, what relevance, what important things will be discovered.

It’s well to look ourselves in the eyes of life and death upon occasion. Astounding to find that we often can. Unnoticed, a lump discovered on a collarbone and nervous fingers fail to find the corresponding nodule on the other side. A moment of discovery to take advantage of; to revel in the calmness and immediate decisions that are made. Glory in the finding of the matching culprit. But knowledge gained, and strength stored for another time.

Odd morning, picking panties from a drawer without a sign of recognition. Wondering when I got them, since I should be most intimately familiar with them all. Worrying not about a spouse’s indiscretion, but worse; a lack of memory, a loss of knowledge, a fear of age.

Thinking about friends, and what it took to make them. Like tracks with hurdles thrown down both with purpose or sometimes uncontrolled. Tests to test for tensile strength. Testing both, and more the tester. The few, the many, which is more important of the runners? Holding on to those mysterious parts that we delight in, or are frightened of, or need to keep protected. Some need drama, mystery, and second-guessing. Hoping, wanting someone to understand, and yet the fear of it is often stronger. How do we connect with one and not the other? Is it common interest or common fear? Strange, strange lives we live in crowds and yet alone. But sometimes two alones become a pair.

Close calls are becoming a way of life for my sister, just back from a traumatic emergency visit to her daughter (the one now sporting a horseshoe shaped scar on her head).

Today’s mail brought this e-mail from her:

“Hi sue – if u watch the news about a truck on fire on 1-95 this morng at 6:30 or so – look on the ramp near 95 – im the 1st car near the flames – i parked and ran down the 2nd ramp and waited – then the state troopers let the backed up cars go off the 2nd on ramp and i was the last one cause i told him i was very nervous – i still am shaking a little…”

I cannot excerpt in bits and pieces what is going on at The Great Lettuce Head and Wanderlust, except to say that if you’re interested in time and space, go read their recent entries.

Neha just turned twenty-two two days ago, and Steve is driven by demons, both are in pursuit of intellectual understanding of life and meaning, and in particular, time and space. Once again, the peaceful mind is poked, the troubled one is further weighted. At three a.m., I didn’t want to get involved, but these are friends, albeit quite annoying with their quest, and unfortunately, the harder I tried to ignore them, the more I thought, and thought and thought. Fortunately, I came up with some answers, and more importantly, The Question, and luckily, it has survived the sunlight, so shall serve me for the day. Night is the time for thinking clearer thoughts; the darkness blotting out the world beyond incandescence, and that’s a big help right there.

Does time exist? Apparently not, except as a measurement. Just as the existence, which is accepted use only, of an inch. If you measure from here to here, it’s an inch. It’s also a nanosecond.

“The past is either a physical object (a photograph, a fossil, a building) or it’s created in the form of story, recalled and told.” So says Steve at GLH. Inspired by this, Neha questions past, present and future, and comes very close to the answer: “Every night I find myself wondering …whether … anything at all will ever matter.”

I disagree that there are no answers. I believe there are millions, or maybe, only 37, like the story plots. Questions are in the millions as well, but there’s really only one that it all comes down to, regardless of the facts, the goings on, the bigger picture, or the quest for knowledge. The question forms the answers and leads us on to a conclusion that is different for each of us, but whatever we come up with is the most vital to our understanding and peace of mind. The Question is repeated until we reach a temporary end. The answers, and the questions we use to seek them always change, except for one:

The Question: So?

“Me Talk Pretty This Morning” is a post at Kottke.org that made me smile. Asked for directions, he makes an effort to reply in the man’s native French. A link brings you to a previous post on being directionally dysfunctional.

While I am practically forbidden by my spouse to offer directions, I myself have complete confidence in my ability to mess things up further in Spanish and have vowed that if presented with such a situation, I would regretfully shake my head, smile, and the furthest I would even point out for direction is the closest person to seek help.

Hop in the car, radio playing “When You’re Strange” by The Doors. Run uptown, gas, deli and postoffice. Seven or eight cars in line at the pumps, I get in before anyone moves because they’re asleep at the wheel, I suppose. First up at the deli, and no one gets in my way at the P.O. I’m out and back home in twenty minutes.

Is there a look on my face that warns them? Does it show?

But I can’t be normal. Nothing is right now.

Thunder rumbles as I’m making dinner. Or is that me, as well…

The day was spent half in sunshine, half in showers; half in frameshop, half in gardens pulling white lilac bush babies out like weeds. They grow and spread into the lawn, decapitated by the mower. But around the house and barn they filled themselves with month-long rain and grew to two feet tall. It gives me something to grip onto as I yank them sadly free. And grass is missing from the lawn but grows in garden soil quite well. I spent the whole day thinking, wondering, planning and unplanning life.

Now I shall read and dream.

Willie’s on tonight, on cable USA and I will miss him. I just can’t seem to want the company of even the gracious offer of my neighbor for popcorn, Willie and wine. For some reason, my basic cable does not include this station, and we watch TV so little that in truth we only took the basic package to save money on the more needed hookup to the internet.

I’m sure Willie will do just fine without me.

Odd; a fifteen minute phone conversation with my husband’s friend. More than a friendly “Hi, how are you? Yes please, may I talk to Jim?” Starting from words of simple understanding we wind around to heaven and beyond. It’s strange, and yet stranger still that every human being has this one thing in common, life and death, and yet we don’t discuss it. But slowly, brought about by circumstances, we reach out. We show the fears for what they are, indeed ours are for others or our loss, and often find in someone else the feeling of adventure for ourselves. How we see death, I think, determines how we live our lives.

I held the picture for a while and stared into my lover’s eyes, his mother telling friends, “Back in college, he and Carrie went together for a while.”

I sought the blueness of his eyes reflecting back with sparkling tears unlike those I remembered. We used to lie in bed and body length to body length, watch the war and listen to the body count, and feel the bitterness and outrage grow as one until we almost puked together; only cried instead.

I hand the picture to another friend, who shakes his head and hands it back to me.

The letter came and called him to a war and his first battle was won within a day. “How can you go?” I screamed, emotion showing in my love for him and me and our ideals. “How can I not?” was all he said, and brushed away my brushing off his kiss goodbye. He marched, I marched, our battles fought on different fields of paddies, congress steps and ours alone on paper. Losing touch, losing sight, finally losing what we had because we disagreed.

“Mother, she’s a whore, he wrote,” I heard her say, a tight tinkling mother’s grieving laugh attached to words. And only then could I shift away and notice her, the wife and child, the smiling family of the photo. She, small with long black shining hair and happy almond eyes. A little one, the same, but almond eyes of blue.

“She’s only nineteen there,” his mother said, “and Joseph’s one. We hope to bring them here before he’s two. She hid him in the bar and bandaged up his wounds. He moved her to a village that was safer, away from city streets and what she had to do, and what he fought them for. She had a garden, he had written once, and the beans were due the same time as their son.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I told his mother. She smiled and nodded, sad but proudly taking back the photo of her family. And I, defeated, turned away from honor, crumpling thoughts of outraged indignation and at last I understood the wounds and wounded.