On the trail one day I paused to talk briefly to a woman.
Her husband and three teen-aged daughters had already passed and had said hello
without stopping, as did most of the many hikers on the John Muir Trail. On
less crowded portions of the PCT people tended to stop for at least a brief
exchange…. Anyway, this woman did stop, and started off with asking me where I
was going, the standard opener. Actually, I think she asked if I was doing the
whole trail, a question the southbound commonly asked the northbound (the
thru-hikers were the stars of the trail). I told her no, I was doing a section,
to Tahoe, maybe more, I didn’t know yet.
“So,” she said, admiringly, “a journey away from life.” I
hesitated, not sure how to respond, and then she corrected herself: “I mean, to
real life.” I smiled and made some
sort of noncommittal noise…. My days in the mountains seemed no more real or
authentic than my familiar life at home. But people on the trail do like to
think they are doing something extraordinary, something superior to the
everyday, the quotidian. Though walking seems ordinary enough….
If backpacking in the wilderness really did seem a more
genuine way of living, then why is it simply a vacation rather than a vocation?
Why don’t people abandon their less “real” lives and take permanently to the
trail?
This morning Grandpa couldn’t find something—a regular
occurrence—and an angry outburst ensued. In part he blames Mom and Rosemary and
Mike at such moments, since they did some cleaning and re-organizing in the
house before he came back from the hospital. He turned to me and said, “When
you’re seventy make sure you get everything set the way you want it…. But it
won’t matter because eventually foreigners will come in and change it all.”
Mom tried to calm him down, telling him he could ask her
where anything was and she’d tell him. But he waved her off. “No, you don’t
understand…. I won’t be able to remember.” He’s partly to blame too, he knows,
though “blame” is hardly the word. His memory betrays him… when it comes to both
new locations and old. Most of his stuff has not been moved, but he’s having a hard time putting his hands on
those items too.
He went outside and sat down on the patio and after a while
I joined him. Somehow he got off on cosmic topics and spoke at length about the
size and mystery of the universe, our great distance from other galaxies, the
“Big Boom” theory…. I helped with words or terms when he needed help…. The
universe got him onto religion, and religion got him onto Maureen O’Hara’s
sister.
Maureen O’Hara, the actress, was some sort of distant
relative (her real last name was Fitzsimons, the same as Grandpa’s). When he
was working at J.C. Penney’s in Long Beach in the 1960s, one of his fellow
employees knew her sister, who was a nun at a nearby convent. Grandpa told me
how each day the woman at work would tell him something more about the O’Hara
family, and each day he would think, I’m going to go visit the sister. “See,
they were our closest link back to Ireland.” Plus, I thought to myself, he
always had a thing for celebrities.
But he didn’t go. He shook his head, in great regret. “Never
put off today what you can do tomorrow…. No, the other way around…. Anyway, it’s
always tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.” But he had finally
gone to visit the nun, only to discover she had been transferred the previous
week to another and distant convent. He never was able to speak with her. His
face turned a little red and his eyes watered. I almost said something about
how everyone procrastinates, but then I didn’t say anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment