Bloods

On my morning walk, I meet up with a neighbor, and we talk about the new signs in the park. Someone’s spray painted an ode to The Bloods under the bridge; there’s graffiti all over trees and stumps, pieces of nature that should be untouched by paint, save the orange band around the dead ones that need to be felled. Where our neighbor, Josette, a French woman, was robbed at gunpoint a few weeks ago, the paint is green, and it says, “Death,” with an arrow pointing into the woods. The poet Pablo Neruda, it is said, wrote in green, it being the color of hope.

My neighbor says she’s “over this world.” (She’s also “over” her dog, too, but that’s another story.) She doesn’t feel connected to other people; evil abounds. I can’t say I am more optimistic than she is, but I’m not ready to make my quietus “with a bare bodkin.” And I don’t want anyone else to do it for me. Besides, I don’t think there’s anything more. (It’s one of the reasons Hamlet didn’t take his own life: “...the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns, puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of....”)

Some think this world is hell, that anything else you get when it's over has to be better. Some believe in the karmic debt, think you keep coming back until you get it right. Most Americans are probably willing to bet the farm on a heaven or a hell. But beyond this, for me, is a void—empty and dark. I think our lights are pretty much snuffed out forever. (I have seen ghosts, but I’m not sure how to work them into my belief system—are they a part of my unconscious desire or separate entities who have found something after life?)

My neighbor turns back at the bridge; she doesn’t walk on the other side now because of the graffiti, which scares both of us. Who needs sticks and stones? I’ve been running in the woods a few times and have remembered The Bloods and have turned around to run back into the clearing, my breath polluted with anxiety.

I meet Thelma at the bridge, and she tells me that one of the pictures she tried to take of me one rainy Saturday morning not long ago turned out nice. She and her sister were here that morning for a “Dyke Hike”; they were expecting about a dozen lesbians for a wet woodland walk. I posed as Thelma aimed her old Nikon at me, but the shutter wouldn’t seem to trip, and I couldn’t get it to work, either. (I cringed when she wiped some gook off the lens with her sleeve and admonished her about scratching it.) My camera worked just fine, so I snapped a few pics of the two lesbians and went on my way.

The picture, she says, not only came out, but I was a hit. Several people asked her if I was “available.” “Not in this life,” I tell her. “Maybe next time.”

Thelma jokes that it should make me feel good to know I’m wanted.

Oh, I agree. “Hey, it doesn’t matter who loves me. It only matters that I’m loved.”

If I were disingenuous, I could stop right here, proclaim that the moral of this story—and any other story about life—is that love is what keeps us going. It's true; I'd certainly confront my mortality with far less trepidation than I do now, with my daughter counting on me. Without her and my family, my dogs, my friends, making my quietus with some raucous partying could be a temptation. But I don't even go near an edge.

It's a false ending anyway. No one in my own skin and brain could make a comment like that without the voice of the conscience, appearing this time as Bruce Cockburn, who sings to me: “Even though I know who loves me I’m not that much less lost.”

But the truth is that I’m not lost today. I know exactly where I’m going. I’m putting my two dogs in the back of the truck, and I’m going home. To write.