Red Rocks

When we were all in elementary school, Mom had Mrs. Quarles take my siblings and me to Sunday School at the Methodist church in the neighborhood. She never went herself and never told us why she didn’t go and once Mrs. Quarles moved away to live closer to her daughter, she didn’t look for another ride for us. I guess she figured she had done her duty in exposing us to Christianity for a few years and salvation was in our hands now. I was a sucker for the story of the good Samaritan, but don’t remember much else other than “Jesus” was usually a good answer to a question and that the Pepperidge Farm cookies they put out at the social after the service were a lot better than the Thrifty-Made, store brand Mom bought for us at the house.

I stayed quiet and waited for cookie time most Sundays, but one day, I got involved with the Sunday School teacher about eternity and it quickly became obvious their grasp on the subject wasn’t as nuanced as mine so they had us all close our eyes and “imagine an eagle flying over the tallest mountain in the world and letting its wing brush lightly against the stone at the top . Now, that eagle only flies over once every hundred years and its wing only gives the lightest touch to the mountain. Think about how long it would take that eagle’s wing to cause that mountain to wear away and, when it’s worn all the way down after millions and millions of years, that would only be the first second of forever..”

That story messed up my mind a bit and didn’t come close to making me feel better about eternity. I had a lot of sleepless nights imagining that eagle flying over Table Rock because that was the tallest mountain I had seen at that point in my life and willing it to flyover it more often so it would wear it down and make those seconds of eternity tick away faster. Those nights were probably the best lessons of eternity I’ve had before or since and watching the sunlight start to peek through my window brought me more comfort than Sunday School or thinking about Jesus ever did.

As an adult, on Sundays, if I was in town, I went to mom's house for dinner. She insisted on calling it that no matter the hour the pot roast ended up on the table despite my assertion it became supper at some point after the sun went down. “If it’s Sunday, then it’s dinner,” was her answer and I gave up trying with her just as I gave up on a lot of things the last few years of her life. What was the point of arguing other than she acted as though she loved it, though she pretended she didn’t by prefacing most of her statements with, “I don’t want to offend you” or ‘“I know you’re not going to like this, but .…”  I let her get away with it most of the time because she couldn’t cause any harm from the house and she had quit voting after Carter, so what did I care if some little, old lady had an opinion that wasn’t going to get past me?

For the last five months, she stopped venturing out except for doctor’s appointments that were religiously kept, even after they recommended hospice, insisting on going and questioning every diagnosis and prediction for the future. Her ending had been running parallel to dad’s and, a few weeks before he died, I was sitting with him in the assisted-living facility he was in-and-out-of the last three years of his life when he asked me about his finances and what was left. They had named me their attorney-in-fact over my siblings because I was the closest one by distance and I didn’t have the lives they all had: spouses and kids and mortgages: all the things mom kept telling me to get and dad admired I didn’t have. “I want your mama to be alright. She might have fifteen years left after I’m gone.”

“She’ll be fine,” I told him. “You did a great job putting money away, so neither one of you has to worry.” I didn’t tell him there weren't fifteen years of funds left, but I also didn’t tell him that the doctors had given Mom two years to live, at most, and it wouldn’t shock anyone if she died before he did. I wondered if we would even tell him if it happened. She hadn’t been to visit him in months due to a fall she’d had, followed by her own stint convalescing at the hospital, then rehab. We tried to get her to stay somewhere where she could have care full-time,but she insisted on coming back to the house, which meant I spent a lot of time running back and forth between there and dad’s temporary place that seemed more permanent with each visit.

Mom told me she felt guilty about not seeing him, but said, “We’ve been together fifty years. He knows I love him.”

That was always funny for me to hear from her as I hadn’t heard them say that to each other for decades and wondered if they really did love each other or if they were just familiar enough that they decided it was easier to stay together. I had asked her one time if she thought dad really loved her and she snapped, “Of course he does. Why would you ask such a thing? Do you think he would have worked that hard to take care of us if he didn’t love us?” I let the change of object in her response go, but that stuck with me for a long time. Over the years, I ended up equating taking care of someone as loving them which usually ended up with them disliking me for not paying attention to myself and me disliking me for the same reason.

  During her last years, she read romance novels by the dozens that I would pick up from the library every two months and then return two and three at a time from the finished pile by her chair that she built every week, dropping them in the box on the curb by the side door until it got down to the last few. The week before the unread pile dried up, I’d go online under her account I had created, as she wasn’t going to take the time to learn how, and reserve the next batch for pickup. 

At first, I’d research the latest releases and cross-check them off the list of books she’d already read to eliminate duplicates. Some titles would be at other branches and would take two or three days to get to the local one, so a week was enough lead time to make sure she had the full complement. It started to get tougher as her three-a-week habit began to deplenish the supply, so the respite of her fall coupled with the book room at the facility eased the backlog a bit, but with her back at home, the problem re-emerged quickly.

I went the first Saturday of each month and the third time in, a new-to-me librarian was behind the counter. She was thirty-five and had been a teacher until recently, when she had decided she’d had enough of other people’s kids for a bit I waited a few beats until she came free from another patron, pretending I didn’t see Ralph, a general acquaintance I knew from back in the day, who was working the other end of the counter. He made eye contact for a moment and looked back down, letting me know he didn’t mind me not coming down to see him and interrupting his own reading. He was a short-timer and was waiting on his last closing bell so he could retire to Mexico and drink on the beach until the world washed away.

When the transaction in front of me ended, I stepped up, running my hand through my hair to make sure my cowlick hadn’t settled into an awkward spot. She was pretty in a lot of ways I liked and had bright, blue eyes that sparked hard, making me lose the cool, detached expression I was going for, so I grinned like an idiot. “Pickup for Kay,” I said as it was the only opener I could think of.

“Be right back. Don’t go anywhere,” she said and turned to the shelves behind her to find the row of books I was taking. I noticed the way the bottom of her yellow, floral dress flew out and up slightly as she twirled. It took her three trips to get them and her dress did the same thing every time. Once she had the entire collection, she began to scan them one-by-one and stack them neatly on the counter. “Romance fan,” she asked with a smile halfway through the task.

‘I am,” I said. “Trying to get some hints to help with a date I have. Wikipedia’s been a bust so far.”

“These will help with a certain subset of the population. A lot of our older ladies find these titillating. You can probably do pretty well with this one in particular.” She held up a book with a purple cover that had a bare-chested man holding a calla lily with billowing clouds framing his hair and physique.

“Oh, have you read it?”

“Three times. It reminds me of the love story my grandma told me about her and grandpa.”

“Really? Is grandpa still around, or is grandma looking for a new beau?” I leaned in and tried not to look creepy, but she was in on it.

“Ahhh. It’s sad. They both passed a few years ago just a few hours apart. It was a heck of a love story.” Before I could continue the spiel, she beat me to it. “And, before you ask, Mom and Dad are still happily together, but I could get your number just in case she decides she needs a change of pace.” She looked down at her screen, “ I would look it up in the system, but it seems this account is for a Mrs. Kay, born in 1945.” Her eyes came back up to me and she stared and I noticed a fleck of mascara on her cheek and thought it was the perfect flaw for her face. “Sugar Mama?”

“No, just my regular mama,” I replied, still looking at that spot on her cheek and trying not to breathe too heavily. The fact she was in on it brought some pressure to the collaboration on which we were working, so I decided to pass on the obvious, but she would’ve beat me to it again if I hadn’t.

“I don’t need to get you a book by Freud, do I,” she asked. She was quicker than I was and that made my heart beat a little faster.

“No, and I already read the play before you start looking that up in your little information machine,” I was able to get out before she could get too far out front, but she topped me quickly. 

“I bet it was fun learning Sophocles under candlelight as the gods intended.”

Her smile drew my attention from the fleck. “Oh, a ‘you’re old’ joke. Are we there already?”

She didn’t blink. “Good, your brain hasn’t started to go yet.That’s a good sign.”

“I eat a lot of salmon and do the crossword while I sit and watch the pigeons in the park. It keeps me young.” I took the plunge. “I’m a bit old fashioned, so I’ll ask you for your number and permission to call and ask you to an early-bird special one night.”
“Aren’t the deals better in the afternoon?”

“They are, but that’s prime naptime for us olds.”

She reached her hand across the counter and picked up my phone. “What’s your passcode?” I gave it to her without thinking and her eyebrow arched. “Nice. A man with nothing to hide.” She punched it in and her fingers flew for a moment before she handed it back to me. “There, I’m in your ‘favorites’ now. Call me anytime you find that deal.”  

“Cool, there’s a Def Leppard concert coming up I’ve had my eye on.” I couldn’t decide if that was part of the routine or if I really wanted to close my eyes and sing along to ‘Hysteria’ with someone actually near.

“Oooh, I love the oldies. We should make that a date.”

I agreed and collected the books to take to Mom. She had been an inveterate reader my whole life and had imbued it into me through immersion. Books were all over the house: piled on tables, shelves, the backs of toilets, and random spots throughout. Her tastes had definitely been wider than the shallow stream in which she was swimming late in life and I remember picking up ‘Fear of Flying’ from her bookshelf when I was twelve and realizing it was something foreign to me, but a language I was hungry to learn. When she noticed I was reading it (which was the third time), she said, “Oh, that’s a good one. Be sure to put it back when you finish.” I did and then found ‘Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York’ on the same shelf, which I read through in a night before moving on to ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife,’ both of which made me want to move to New York, but every time I mentioned that, Mom would roll her eyes and ask, “Do you want to kill your mother, because I would die when I got the phone call you’d been murdered in that city.” 

Mom’s travels were in her reading and she hated to leave the house except for a yearly trip to the beach where she’d complain about the sand and salt so, while Dad was taking us out into the woods to camp or Atlanta for Braves’ games, she would stay ensconced, the piles of adventures waxing and waning around her. 

I read almost everything she did back then along with the usual sci-fi and fantasy that was popular or unknown. I stalked the stacks of the library at the university, unable to check anything out without a student ID, but reading in spurts on the afternoons there was no sports practice to get through. We were close enough to get there by bike, so Jason, my next-door-neighbor, and I would ride up there two or three days a week and hang out with the college kids, which meant grabbing a fountain coke and bag of popcorn from the student union and sitting by the fountain pretending the girls had an interest in us before heading into the library. 

I was tall enough to pass for a student, but Jason didn’t hit his growth spurt until he went away to Florida for school, returning taller than me that first summer back, and our trips typically resulted in nothing but empty cups and then a few hours reading deep in the bowels of the library, timing our return trip by the available sunlight. Mom’s reluctance to travel encompassed crossing the bridge into the city, so I never told her where we went as she would have prohibited it and then not followed up with discipline to make sure it wasn’t still going, so I figured the lie of omission was gentler than the lie of defiance.

On one trip, I struck up a conversation with a girl who sat beside us at the fountain. I was reading a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates that Sophie Vargas, a girl in high school, had mentioned and had leant me when I asked her more about it. I didn’t discover the note she’d put into it until weeks later and, by that time, the delay had hurt her feelings and she took the book back and declined my invitation to play putt-putt the next weekend. “I'm going out with Adam now. You had your chance.” It seemed a bit capricious to me, but I accepted it and we ended up making out in her driveway a few weeks later after Adam talked to Ashley Stevens in front of her one night at Rush’s and she grabbed me and asked me to walk her home. 

The dark-haired girl at the fountain pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit it in a smooth motion, taking a deep pull before tilting her head back and blowing a plume of gray smoke into the air. I hated smoking then and now, but her nonchalance was intoxicating. She was small, with long, dark hair and milk chocolate eyes, familiar in some aspects, but foreign overall, her skin a little darker, but not dark, her face a little different, as though her people had from a part of the world adjacent to that of mine . My high school was pretty much a mirror of the university back then, very binary in black and white and those that stood out were those that varied from those two descriptors, which were the ends of the spectrum to an unworldly , Southern bred, fifteen-year-old and her look was exotic to me and her voice had no accent I’d ever heard in real-life.

“I love that book,” she said and I pretended to notice her for the first time though I’d been staring at her as best I could without making eye contact since she had walked up.

“I just started it. A girl gave it to me.” I immediately regretted saying that and could feel my face starting to burn.

“She’s from my hometown.” I thought she meant Sophie, whom I had known since kindergarten, so the confusion must have been deep on my face. “Joyce Carol Oates. She’s from Millersport, New York, where I’m from.”

“Oh,” I said, “I didn’t know that. Is that near the city?” I did know enough from my readings that New York was “the City” and then everything else.

She laughed and my face got even warmer. “”No. It’s about as far from the city as you can get. It’s in the middle of a bunch of farms.”

My blush of embarrassment turned to confusion. “Oh, I didn’t think New York had a bunch of farms.”

“They’re all over the place up there. Just as many as there are down here, I bet.” We talked for a while and I began to get into a rhythm with her, figuring out how to anticipate the conversation and keep it going. It didn’t take long to find out she had come down to school here because her Dad had known Strom Thurmond in the war. The two men had stayed in touch and lined up a job for her with his office in Columbia while she was in school. Her Dad had waited until he was almost forty to start a family and she had grown up in a Rockafeller Republicans household, but she admitted she had voted for Clinton in the last election and would be again in the next.

Things had been going along great until that point, but when she asked me who I had voted for, Jason, whom I had forgotten in all honesty, piped in. “Vote?! He’s only fifteen! He won’t be old enough by the next election even.”

She leaned back and looked at me through the smoke and a smile crept upwards and I melted a bit even though the rage at Jason was bubbling. “Fifteen, huh? You’re pretty tall for a fifteen year old. That’s too bad. I was going to ask if you wanted to see a movie this weekend. Holy Grail is playing at The Nick.”

I blurted out, “I do,” as quickly and loudly as Jason had outed me and she smiled even more.

“I don't think that’s a great idea. Tell you what though. Look me up when you’re, oh, twenty-three or so and we’ll go see that movie.”

“I’ll find you when I’m eighteen.” I could hear the pleading in my voice.

“Wait a little longer and call some girls your age for a while. I’ll be around somewhere. I’m never getting married or having kids, much to my mother’s chagrin. My name is Emily Sayegh.” She spelled it out for me, then stood up and I was too flustered to follow suit, so I sat stupidly as she kept on smiling, shook her head and walked away. 

I didn’t see her again until I was twenty-five, when I walked into my first legal writing class and she was sitting on stage behind the professor who introduced her and another student as his teaching assistants, both 3Ls. Despite her nineteen-year-old assertion of non-matrimonial and child free intentions, she got married after getting pregnant as a senior and delayed law school for a few years after graduating as I had. We ended up going to that movie and more when her husband, from whom she was separated, but not yet divorced, had their eight-year-old on overnights. After she finished law school, she moved to D.C. to work on the Kerry campaign and she ended up staying up there, so we were reduced to exchanging Facebook ‘likes’ every time one of us posted we were in a new relationship and wishing each other a ‘Happy Birthday’ via text rather than social media to assert that closeness we all pretend is still there years after we sleep with someone for a few months.

A few times a year, usually after she learned about  the ending of one of my short-lived relationships, Mom would ask about her. “How is Emily? I liked her and she had the cutest little boy.” She had named the kid, Jason, which I found funny, but was her ex’s middle name and Mom was right that he was a cute kid. He shuttled back and forth between DC and Florida, where her ex ended up working for a succession of Republicans that eventually ended up in the statehouse, a child of two worlds.

“She’s great. Always busy and Jason’s graduated college now and living in San Diego.” I think he wanted to get as far away from both of them as possible. She had been hard on him about school and career and I assume his Dad was as well, in sharp contrast to my  parents who seemingly barely knew I was even in school. I knew this due to the semi-regular conversations we had, usually with one of us a little tipsy and wondering why things hadn’t worked out or wondering if they ever would. 

On some of those calls, we’d arrange meetings in random cities and spend a long weekend walking around, ducking into coffee shops and sampling “The World’s Best Chocolate Cake '' which a lot of places put on the chalk boards hanging behind the baristas. Some were better than others, much as some of the trips were. We fought in the Seattle rain in front of the original Starbucks because I wasn’t doing enough to move my life forward according to her, while, according to me, I was struggling to take care of my dying parents and figuring out how to get out from the bottom of that dark hole I’d found myself in and couldn’t explain how or why I was there. 

Being angry snapped me out of whatever I was going through for a moment and put a spark in her eyes and we ended up staying in the hotel the rest of the weekend, holed up in the room, naked and ordering room service for the next forty-eight hours making up for the harsh words. We ended that trip kissing goodbye fervently at the airport, flying different flights, her’s direct to DC and mine routed through three destinations and arriving home the next day. That encounter sparked something in both of us and I began to write again and picked up some side gigs writing bios for bands and “reviews” for restaurants around town. She quit her job and got one that she liked a lot better that let her travel with an income that seemed outrageous to me if it had been anyone but her getting it. I knew what she was worth.

The longest gap between rendezvous was going on near the end of Mom’s life when she started dating an environmental lobbyist and they traveled the world, having dinners in very nice pockets of cities surrounded by absolute chaos. “He thinks he’s helping the earth. It’s adorable,” she told me during a tipsy call when he was on a trip to Kenya and she’d gotten into the cups a bit in an Ethiopian restaurant in Adams Morgan with some of her co-workers. “I think he’s going to ask me to marry him when he gets back.” I stayed silent for a moment as I tried to calculate how that would affect me and came to the realization I was happy for her and would put a big ol’ heart on the Facebook status of “engaged” if it ever popped up.

He ended up asking her when he got back and she said “yes,” but the status never changed and the wedding never happened and we met in Denver for a show at Red Rocks the weekend after Mom died. “He just wanted to do one thing, no matter where we were, he just wanted to save the fucking planet.”

“And that’s a bad thing, “ I asked as my hand lightly traced figures on her back as we were lying in a tent in Rocky Mountain National Park.

“Of course not. It’s just that I want something different. Not every day, but sometimes and always changing and growing. I don’t want to spend my life going in circles. You know, evolution. He acts as though things don’t evolve. Like global warming is a bad thing.”

“Well, I’m not a fan of it,” I said.

“No human should be, but it’s not going to be a bad thing for the Earth because the Earth doesn’t give a shit if we’re here or not. It’s hubris to think we matter.”

“So, to hell with it all?”

“Yep. But, until then, I want to do more. I want to walk the Grand Canyon without worrying about the snail darter.”

“That’s Tennessee,” I said reflexively and I could feel her sigh underneath my hand.

“Not important. What is important is that no matter what we do, we’re all going to disappear. Just like your mom, then me, then you, then Jason, then the snail darter, then the bears, then everything. It’s all going to disappear and get replaced and then those replacements will disappear until they don’t get replaced anymore and then it all goes ‘poof’ and nothing is left for forever. So, while I’m here, I want to stop worrying about everything and just enjoy it.”

I kept stroking her back in the tent for a while before things progressed. After, we showered and went to the show. I looked out over the rocks and thought about how long they’d be there after we disappeared and memories of those nights lying in bed as a kid freaked out about eternity almost overwhelmed me with a few minutes of anxious panic until I looked over and saw Emily swaying, her eyes closed, singing along to the band. When I reached for her hand, she smiled and slipped in close to me and we swayed together until the red glow faded from the rocks and the band finished playing and I felt the brush of her hand in mine and it kind of felt like forever.