It’s a long ride to everywhere around here.
Our climate is comfortable but the flat and immutable terrain causes one to leave often or dream a lot. Twenty miles from either nearest town (though one is considered a city now, since Hobbs Texas Mesquite is New Mexico
Our town bears one grocery store, a couple of convenience chains, lots of nail and hair huts. Lovington, at one time, wasn’t bereft of bars or churches, but the bulk of the bars closed down shortly after the package windows did. Still plenty of churches though and their backdrop consists of oilrigs and pump jacks. The local newspaper prints Sunday’s news on Saturday. Tomorrow’s news today.
It wasn’t always so poor to look at. Reversals. Reversals of oil prices, reversals of fortunes, reversals of faces, of futures. Three years short of its first centennial, 2005 in Lovington finds its antithesis. Rich or poor, Lovington finds itself driven one direction or another by the price of oil.
At one time, this flat and sandy rangeland was known for grazing cattle and masochistic farmers are still trying their hand at growing cotton amidst rock and caliche. Many ranchers are retired now and oil’s pendulum prices have caused proprietors to look at Lovington with squinted eyes. Venturing elsewhere. They take their gifts, fashionable clothes and their jewelry with them. Even our bowling alley and skating rink vanished long ago.
Thus we travel for entertainment, for shopping, for mountains, lakes and streams. All of us here. The desert people of my town. We’re different from the northern part of New Mexico
Up there—Santa Fe, Ruidoso, Albuquerque, all those places one hears so much about—people are different. The Native Americans with their mountains, they have more color, more spice, more something than those of us who live in this desert oil patch. Men fall from oilrigs out here, then send their revenue to Santa Fe
But mostly, when I leave, I head-out for Lubbock
So, for nearly two years, the three of us, Eric Clapton, my car and I would travel two hours each way for school and home. Stress from school brought with it an energy of its own. High or low and not much in between. My car and Clapton worked together as my sounding board on the way to the city abundance of Lubbock
I had a lot to get home to.
Bob Dylan is the songwriter, but it’s Eric Clapton who sings Born in Time to me. Sorrow resounds in dysphoric destiny on Clapton’s Pilgrim CD—a Blues favorite of mine—one that continuously plays in my car when I drive. Not long ago, I loved to drive. And I loved my car.
A 1993 Camry XLE. Yes, it’s a decade and two years old, still runs like a top. Besides, I refuse to spend on a new car what I once spent on my house. The green is so dark it looks black and she sports a body style like no other before or since. The interior is still decent except for right under the windows where the dark color draws on too many rays. Thin slits appear here as though some little darling took a razor to it, but since I don’t ride in the backseat, I find no real offense. Being an XLE (three letters as opposed to two, pricier and scaled-up a notch from the common Camry XL), it has all the bells and whistles.
One major defect: the CD player. But in the XLE of ’93, the equalizer compensates somewhat for this flaw; however, if a CD plays in my system numerous times, it too, inherits the defects. Each bump tests it, then finally engraves its mark. The Pilgrim CD, well etched. I still cringe at each bump, but I know the lyrics by heart and always help Clapton fill in. Or at least, I thought I did. Then yesterday, I ended up in the passenger seat with time on my hands and looked up the lyrics.
Full credit to Dylan when he wrote where the ways of nature will test every nerve. Proxied to Clapton, changed by me. I was singing will test everyone. Same thing in a way, but nerve is better. Especially yesterday.
Lately, the Camry has been getting crowded, and Clapton and I are giving up some of our space to family members. I was merely a passenger on this particular ride, hence my ability to have read the lyrics for the first time.
Did Dylan envision that someday someone like Clapton would record it? Blues, passed on, handed down, art reverberated in multiple hearts.
And I’ve thought about Conor, Clapton’s son who died a sudden death, and I’ve wondered if Clapton is healed now, though the song has nothing to do with this particular sorrow. Perhaps Tears in Heaven helped him begin to heal, to launch his grief. One needs a place to commence the process. Is there an order to these things?
Shock runs to the rescue all by itself.
I don’t know yet if grief ends. I don’t even know anymore where I’m at in this thing called grief. A full fifteen months into it. Haven’t missed a day yet.
Anyway, it’s not Dylan I think of when I listen to the Blues. It’s Clapton. Clapton lost a son. Clapton knows how long and how short. Time is both of these.
Time.
People try to get you not to think about the death of a son.
Need more time.
My car, Clapton, me: once spending a great deal of time together alone, rehearsing, sorting things out between the flat red plains of West Texas and the desert (color it lonely) of Southeastern New Mexico.
But now. Now, I sort things out when I walk Aaron’s dog. My dog. Our dog. The dog that found the ambiance of Aaron in that final box.
Does Hennessy know?
Aaron was twenty-one when he was killed in the Al Anbar Province of Iraq. He'll be posthumously awarded the military’s third highest award. His dad will accept the Silver Star Medal for him next week on July 22, 2005. Aaron’s heroics during a firefight that day saved several lives. He didn’t want to quit. He died three times. Nothing to be done about it that third time.
Did he argue with God the first two times? He won for a time then.
Two days after his death, four Marines were baptized. Those and other Marines designed a memorial for my son and two other Marines that were killed two weeks earlier. It was captured on film by Rick Loomis, one of the top photojournalists in California
Were the baptized Marines Aaron’s Purpose?
Aaron made me so proud. And he broke my heart.
Hennessy smelled something I couldn’t that day the Marines brought me the box. For that, I’ll always be a little jealous. As well, I’ll always be indebted to the animal that mourned with me that day.
He couldn’t talk. But he knew.
Walking cheers him some.
When I walk my dog by proxy, I allow Hennessy to bless the pine trees, the elms, the evergreens. He adds his nitrates and tests his testosterone only after he snorts up the aroma of what surely must be the inferior results of other male dogs. I have no clue as to why this animal desires one tree over another. When he seems particularly miffed at some smell, perhaps another territorial pit, we spend a great deal of time there. One of these trees is an Afghan Pine.
I think we must transplant a great many pines down here in Lovington. It must remind us of the mountains that are less than three hours away. When Hennessy takes his time at this particular Afghan Pine, I pose under it, listen to the winds of the Navajo, shut my eyes, and for a time, share in their chants. My soul moves in unison to their dance. Though I don’t know them, I share in some spirit sorrow.
Like with a seashell, a souvenir from someone else’s vacation, I hear the ocean. And it’s nowhere near.
Near this pine, I can smell the clean—not the overpowering vapor of disinfectant—but of pure. Its fragrance is green and unflavored oxygen. The soft needles join in the dance to our Lord of the breezes. An umbrella shade from a dead dry heat.
Respite.
I find these singular shared walks comforting. My car is losing ground.
This past month, I’ve shared a little more with multiple family members than I’m accustomed to. Fit for, actually. It stretches me. Days, abilities, echoes of my thoughts in a silent manner have disappeared. My sixteen-year-old stepson moved in with us a month ago. He lived with his mother in Washington
Yesterday, four of us ventured on a shopping trip to the same city two hours away that I once drove to weekly with Clapton, the road bumps, a few chinks in our armor, thoughts. My car has always belonged to us. Alone. There was solitude. Time to think, to sort, to ponder. At that time, troubles appeared overwhelming: school, tests, Spanish verbs, family. Aaron at war. His first tour to Iraq
The first time he came home by ship and we had a party. The second time he came home by cargo plane. I’ll never forget that day. Seeing that casket shook me more than hearing the news. Two stiff Bloody Mary’s numbed me for the ride back to Texas.
I don’t know if grief began then or earlier or later.
Before April 26, 2004: one test after another. Now: The Test. Will I fail?
Aaron’s Purpose, met. In God’s plan all along.
Why was it in God’s plan?
So many families deal with the same loss.
Was God mad at them too?
God wasn’t mad at himself when he sacrificed His own Son.
No, it was redemptive.
I answer my own questions. The problem: there are either no answers or forty answers.
I ponder God and Aaron and Aaron and God. I read in David’s Psalms and in Jeremiah’s Lamentations. And I write in metaphors or similes. Like a rusted nail has been driven through my heart. I ponder all the time and it’s tough to ponder with other people around so much.
Broken sentences.
Fragments.
Even Jesus had to get away from the multitude.
And I can’t write a plain paragraph about all that Aaron’s life here on earth meant to me. Or about all his eternity means to me now.
I need time. I need quiet.
I need a refuge.
The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Written in Deuteronomy. The book of promise and of punishment.
Gain.
Loss.
It’s beyond me.
Yesterday, we each had our own shopping list. From metal roofing to clothes fit for an upcoming wedding. My husband, myself, my niece, Kayla De’on (yes, she’s also my namesake which intensifies the challenge), and my sixteen-year-old stepson, Kaika, my son by proxy—we all rode together in my Camry. With Clapton.
All of us together, on a highway stretched and bordered by desert mesquite, pump jacks, red sand, and nothing else, except time.
Time in the present form. In your face, as the teens say.
Kaika immediately put his headphones on. As I tried to listen to Clapton, I felt the gangster beat of music I sometimes like to dance to, but care very little for on a two-hour trip. Beat by beat.
Kayla worked on her embroidery. She’s very feminine in every way. Big into ballet, poetry, pinks, smell-goods and make-up. Glitter and other frosty items. Frappuccinos too, though I’ve yet to see her finish one. She’s twelve, going on twenty. Got her monthly cycle a couple of years ago and our lives haven’t been the same since.
Kaika, well, the man in him is showing off, sucking and slurping on some orange drink in a plastic bottle. A hard plastic bottle that he’s already seen fit to shred every piece of the label from. One rip at a time.
Kaika’s cool. A Skater, I think he calls it, though I’ve yet to see him skate. When he stands up, his new jeans sag. There’s plenty of room for him and two or three of his friends in this pair of mimicked-already-half-used-jeans. Jeans that look as if they’re waiting for him to grow into, big and strong. To use up some reserved room left over.
Maturity. Does it enter from the backside?
I’ve never heard so many mouth noises over twenty-four fluid ounces in my life. We’re all happy when he finishes the drink. I think maybe even Kaika.
He gives Kayla a bunch of trouble over her cap. She got it in Santa Fe
She more than fills out the black tank top, proof positive someone in our lineage was well endowed. My sister and I can’t prove this for her. It’s an origin thing, though it missed a generation or two.
Kaika says, “Your cap looks like a hacky-sack.”
She smiles big, twists one wrist, flips her palm up in his face. “Right,” she says, concentrating on the ballet shoe she’s embroidering in pink upon a flour sack. Her Granny taught her only yesterday. Today, she’s perfecting the craft. She smiles and the frost upon her thick dark lashes is enough to make me take notice.
And I wonder as I gaze at her, then him, do you have a clue as to what you are doing?
My mind is racing with XY’s, YY’s, or Xxes. Something. I can’t remember anymore. Anyway, it’s male-female.
Kaika belches the orange drink. Twenty-something fluid ounces down the hatch. And counting.
I remember studying something in a Freshman Psy 101 class about classical music creating bridges or neurons or sparking some fluff in the brain. It happens when people listen to classical music or study hard stuff. I turn off Clapton and tune-in University Radio Station, 89.1. Though I once sought it late in the night for Jazz while attending the university, I’m well aware of what’s on the airwaves now. In between the NPR messages that is.
I’m trying to build the kids’ neuron bridges. I guess. Really, I don’t know anymore. But through my visor mirror, I’m just watching too much color wafting up from the backseat. Beiges swim into the blues. Kaika’s still belching and my husband and I are grimacing. Kayla. No impression.
This is what worries me. She stitches and sews. Concentrates. She gives her project as much attention as some artisan must’ve once given her cap. The man in Kaika forces him to give her pointers with the handiwork.
Kaika’s dad can’t take much more on the mouth noises and tells him to cut it out.
Kayla and Kaika are cousins by proxy. Proxy worries me. Rights handed down to rights. I keep looking in the back. Even Clapton couldn’t soothe me now.
The kids, not linked by blood. They enjoy each other’s company too much for my taste. For Aaron’s taste.
Aaron always kept up with Kayla. His little girl cousin. His blood. Off-limits to anything smacking of the opposite sex.
One night, a few years back, Kayla was lounging, reading. Aaron sat down beside her. He took her book and read the title out loud. Karen Kepplewhite is the World’s Best Kisser. It was a fourth-grader’s book.
In the lowest of tones, almost secretively, he knitted his dark eyebrows and asked, “Little Pretty, don’t you think you should be reading Jesus books?”
He watched out for her, teased her. He was wild, but wanted her restrained.
When he was home for his last Christmas, she got streaks in her hair. He told her it looked like she fell into a bleach bottle. He was her guardian angel then. And I guess I think I’m supposed to pick up where he left off.
More proxy.
Aaron never saw Kayla this frosted except when she danced a ballet for him at his Welcome Home Party from the first trip. She danced to Mariah Carey’s Hero.
Could he see her from heaven when she danced to the same song at his memorial?
In one abrupt second, I’m brought out of the moment. Or the past? Kaika refers to the radio and says, “That music sounds like music they’d play in a Kay’s Jewelers.”
I listen anyway as the tension builds in the strings. Try ignoring the tension surfacing in my neck. I vaguely wonder if Kaika has ever been inside a Kay’s Jewelers.
Minutes away from Lubbock
The kids and I decide we’ll wait in the car; the temperature is a triple digit, the air conditioner on full blast. The London Philharmonic plays away, makes the most of the Camry’s equalizer. It’s the Camry, now.
No longer mine.
After what must be a few years, I start wondering if my husband is lost.
Kaika announces he’s bored.
I give my patience speech. We wait a while longer.
“It’s good to develop patience,” I say again.
Kaika gives me his deep look, tests his peripheral vision, assures himself that Kayla is indeed attentive, then asks, “How do you develop patience?”
“By going through hard stuff. Persevering.”
“Huh?”
“Living through it. Going on.” I’m out of definitions.
The muffled music blares from Kaika’s headphones. Everything I hear from these muffles, I don’t want to hear.
It’s like the music Aaron played at that age.
I can’t take anymore. I open the passenger door and quietly slam it, then walk into the cool refrigeration of the gigantic building. I spot Greg flirting with a clerk. The clerk is male, but Greg flirts with everyone. He can’t help himself. I’m his for a reason.
Together, my husband, the clerk and I, establish that we are just about done here. I return to the green Camry, the air conditioner compressor on-off-on-off. Working overtime.
I pay close attention to the two left in my charge. My namesake. And Kaika. My new son.
I lower my eyes to the photo framed within plastic. It dangles from my purse. An appendage most likely meant for identification rather than mementos. Aaron was fifteen then. Shaved the middle of each eyebrow out, special, for just this school picture. Thoughtful of him.
My heart shreds. One rip at time.
I have so many of these photos left over.
I can make it through this again.
My only remaining child, my son, the healthy one.
It’s going to take a while to put him to rest in my heart. What with the Marine Ball, then the Silver Star ceremony, the memorials and presentations. All those bricks and stone and marble, the graphite, the many dark colors with his name carved in them. His name always in white or light.
Everything a contrast.
But I can make it through.
Perseverance and pine. Origins and seashells by the seashore. Male impressing female. Music versus music. Children. Moms. The living here and the living there. Dog is man’s best friend.
I pray to the Man of all this.
I can make it through anything. I know. Like Clapton knew.
Did Clapton know? He wrote that he knew. But now, nearly fifteen years later, does he know more? Is there something he can give me, let me borrow for a time? Did he argue with the two-edged sword?
Will he write me a new song for a new time? Maybe in a new car. When things are better. Blues without grief. That’d be nice.
It’s been a long ride.
Greg gets back into the car and flirts with us. We’re on the road again, headed toward the abundance of the city. Different strains, tones and colors.
Singular thoughts.
Shared music.
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