Issue #60

Dazed and Diffused

We leave Hawaii for Michigan. This should be a straightforward 11-hour redeye transfer of our fleshly vessels from the middle of the Pacific to the middle of the country, but we complicate it with a short stop in California. After living half the year in the most isolated spot on earth, we push pause before re-entry to mainland society. I’d call it a liminal space but there’s nothing remotely eerie or spiritual or mysterious about this transition. It’s a just pleasant pit stop between one beautiful place and another.

As we drive down the coast of California, bright blue sky disappears into a haze. Fog or fire? we wonder. Probably just marine layer, Husband says.

I don’t know what he’s talking about. I thought Marine Layer was the name of the place where I got my Kyra Poplin Barrell Pants, an elastic-waist garment that still fits when none of the others do.

Husband is shocked but not surprised by my lack of common knowledge. After all I only recently found out exactly where Connecticut was, and I’m still not sure what the difference is between Wyoming and Montana. Generally I know where I am and I know where I’ve been, and every other place exists in an amorphous state on a continent I might be able to identify.

Husband explains that the marine layer is a thin mass of clouds on coastal areas caused by the difference in temperature between the ocean and the air above it. After a half hour of driving, the haze breaks up and we’re back to that beautiful brand of California light.

On our second flight, to Michigan, a bald man with spotless leather sneakers and a nice watch is sitting in my assigned seat, an aisle seat. From the way he looks up at me when I ask him to relinquish his 17 x 33-inch kingdom, I know instantly that the man is a classic Baby King. Naturally he throws a controlled conniption. He believes me when I say the seat is mine, but he can’t believe it! The airline must have changed his seat! Or his assistant made a mistake because he “always has an aisle seat, never a window.” The woman next to him, his girlfriend or wife or business partner, tries to calm him down. “Are you going to be okay?” she says firmly.

The Detroit airport, like LAX, feels like a giant sealed cage with tunnels and chutes and walkways for mobs of stressed humans to scurry along in the hopes of getting to an exit. Kauai’s airport, by contrast, is an indoor-outdoor space with warm breezes flowing through and palm trees just on the other side of a volcanic rock wall.

Ahead of me a young guy with a leashed dog waits as the dog raises his haunches and drops two turds on the polished terrazo floor. When the dog is done, the guy moves forward as if nothing happened. Can you believe that? I say to Husband. Husband shrugs. I can’t believe that, I say, louder, hoping the guy will hear. You are not the doo-doo police, Husband responds. When I pass the guy a short time later, I give him the Glare of Glares anyway. Under the shadow of his baseball cap, he smirks.

Mainlanders, pssht. No kuleana, just me, me, me.

[Let me interject that I do not actually think all mainlanders are jerks. Understand that I am in a travel funk and looking for reasons to stay in it. Moping over good fortune is not a good look, I know.]

Chores await me in northern Michigan—so much cleaning and weeding and planting to open the house back up—but for today I choose only one chore, grocery shopping. This usually dreaded trip allows me to wander anonymously and alone, to drift through the warehouse like fog.

Too many choices make the shopping take longer. On island there are only a few different brands, and because everything is brought in on a barge on Tuesday, by the weekend choices are even more limited. It makes life simpler if occasionally frustrating.

I come across an old lady in the bottled water aisle. She’s looking at a six-pack of Smart Water, trying to read the label. I’m so mixed up about water, she says. Me too, I say, but I’m not thinking about water, I’m thinking about being mixed up.

I begin a carrot cake for a family gathering. The recipe is from Husband’s Aunt Joann, and I always feel connected to her when I bake it. I set out of a sheet of waxed paper on the counter to peel carrots. Usually I just peel carrots directly into the trashcan, so I’m not sure why I’m taking this extra step. I seem to be doing everything slowly and deliberately. Blame the jet lag. Blame my innate sense of drama.

Anyway, peeling carrots is therapeutic, the way each long sliver loops gracefully onto the waxed paper. Aunt Joann is at my side, and now my mother is too. I picture her sitting at the kitchen table, waxed paper in front of her, peeling potato after potato. I feel her good sense, her cheerfulness, her fortitude. I tear up. I miss her suddenly, even after all these years she’s been gone. The past wells up like another place I’ve left behind, a different country I can’t return to but can never move on from.

A third presence makes itself known—poet Seamus Heaney—sitting with his mother peeling potatoes. Later I will look up the last lines of “While the Others Were at Mass” to see the exact words as he wrote them:

I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

I strip the rest of the carrots of their earthy coverings and throw the mound away.

I hug everyone hello. It’s nice. People ask, Are you glad to be home? It’s a pleasantry, not a serious question. The simple answer is yes. Just say yes, Maggie. Y-E-S. Yes, it is great to be back! It’s so good to see you! Instead I give a overly-long answer about how I miss my life in Kauai and I just love the ocean and the humidity and our simple life, but sure, I did miss people, I missed family. Which could be construed as insulting or insufferable to present company.

I tell myself to stop processing out loud. In a few days all will be well. The marine layer will clear, as it always does, and there’ll be sunshine aplenty. By the end of the year my allegiance will be to this new place and these new faces, and I will be sad to leave them behind too.

Margaret, are you grieving?
Why yes, I am. 
Over golden beaches you're leaving?
No. Not just the beach. It's all the change, so much change. 
Ah! ás the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder—
Exactly. Who knows what terrible things might happen before I return next year? 
And yet you will weep and know why.
Yes. I’ll be that much older. It’s all going too fast.
It is the blight man was born for
Women too. It ends for all of us—
It is Margaret that you mourn for.

*

Addendum

“Spring and Fall to a Young Child” has always belonged to me, and not just because Hopkins addresses the poem to a girl with my name. When I was little, my older sister Annie had to memorize the poem for school, and thereafter she’d recite it dramatically when she saw me, which I loved. One Christmas she also decoupaged the poem on a piece of wood as a gift.

Spring and Fall to a Young Child
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for. 

*

Speaking of poems, here’s an old favorite about another in-between place. (If there’s a child nearby, read it out loud.)

Halfway Down
by A. A. Milne

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair
Where I sit.
There isn't any
Other stair
Quite like
It.
I'm not at the bottom,
I'm not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where
I always
Stop.

Halfway up the stairs
Isn't up
And it isn't down.
It isn't in the nursery,
It isn't in town.
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head.
It isn't really
Anywhere!
It's somewhere else
Instead!

*

In 2015, Seamus Heaney’s “While The Others Were Away At Mass” was voted Ireland’s most beloved poem of the last century. Here’s Irish actor Aaron Monaghan reading it.

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