Myrtle Beach, 1970s

 I grew up in Ohio, and the ocean we went to for vacations was the Atlantic Ocean, and the shore was in South Carolina.  We would drive ten hours in the car to get there and we would stay in a house known to us from 3 or 4 lines of print--maybe less, because what was there to say--in a thick rental brochure which would arrive in the cold, bleak spring of Ohio. Houses to rent were just listed, entry after entry in super small print--with no photos--just the information (three bedrooms, full bath, outdoor shower) and the quality for which you paid more: how many blocks back from the beach.  My father would pick a house and we would take this long 16 hour drive to get there, crowded in the back seat, the three of us kids, looking for license plates, playing word games, trying to keep our fussiness quiet back there. We would pick up the key from a rental agency and drive to the house, and there it was. Usually musty, with metal bunk beds and thin mattresses.  I didn't care--I loved the idea of the ocean.  To think of the wealth of information available now--the photos and the reviews and the description of the kitchen utensils and sheet counts.  The code emailed to you on the morning of the beginning of your week, your two weeks.

One year, this would have been in the seventies sometime, my Uncle Steve and his girlfriend Lois, who I loved and was sure he would marry, just as I was sure my Aunt Rose would marry her college boyfriend, Fred, because I didn't understand why you wouldn't marry the person you loved if you were lucky enough to be an adult, which they were, at 20 or 22, to my eyes--one year, Steve and Lois came to Myrtle Beach with us. Let me pause and tell you my mother's youngest siblings, Steve and Rose, felt like aspirational older siblings to me, and I desperately wanted to fit in with them, for them to see me as mature, worth spending their precious time with when they came home from college.  

 That year, probably five blocks back from the ocean, I was staying up late, out on some kind of porch or little deck attached to the house, and talking with Steve and I was in love with that moment. I loved that it was late and no one was shooing me to bed.  I loved that Steve wanted to talk with me, all of twelve years old or so.  I don't know if Steve and Lois had been drinking or smoking pot--that was sort of invisible to me--but I wonder now because at some point in the dark night, the humid air full of salt, surrounded by blocks and blocks of inexpensive vacation houses, Steve turned to me--and in a serious voice, worried, suddenly frightened and frightening--and asked me if I ever thought that the whole world was kind of a drama put on for us by someone or something else.  If I ever wondered if I turned my head quickly, would I see blankness, nothing for a minute, because the thing or the person or the god wasn't expecting me to look that way, and didn't have time to put up the elaborate set that passed for the real.  I guess it seems obvious now there may have been some marijuana involved, but it felt so earth-shattering to me.

A kind of Truman Show idea but before the Truman Show was made. The Matrix, pre-Matrix. The White Whale, 100 years later.  What if we looked into the abyss and all there was was the abyss, made worse, somehow, by a drifting, uncaring menace at the core of it all? 

The idea flattened me with fear. I could absolutely imagine that because that was what kind of imagination I had; in those years, I spent a quantifiable amount of time waiting to be whisked away to Narnia. Steve's idea conjured up a whole world of emptiness, of a threatening, empty stage of a planet, where something controlled the wholly indifferent facade I called my life. I remember sitting like a statute on that step, afraid to turn around because what if I glimpsed this emptiness and suddenly had to allow in what I sometimes suspected, that none of this was quite real, or if real, not quite with the meaning with which I imbued life.   

I have carried forward that haunting moment into my present, and I can picture us sitting on that porch, impossibly young, the three of us, letting the dark strangeness of that neighborhood and the lateness of the hour, trick us into this sudden drop into existential, cartoonish fear. I tend to endow the universe with more meaning now, with more purpose and connected by more love. When I contemplate death, I don't panic.  I think of the thousands upon thousands who have crossed over--like birth, like giving birth or like being born. All uncharted and yet all managed and endured.

It's been a long time since I've managed to finish a piece of writing to send out to you. When I think of this hard season, from late October to today, it's through a glass darkly. I haven't been well. I've had two surgeries: a back surgery to shore up my disintegrating spine, and surgery on my left leg, which was decimated by cancer. I now have a metal plate in my leg, which is meant to shore up my lost knee and femur. The metal plate feels heavy and strange and I'm not sure it will ever be right because the cancer made the surgery far from ideal. I'm spinning through different treatments now--nothing taking exactly. I'm no longer on a trodden path. I'm in a clinical trial and on the verge of being kicked out. Dangerously low blood pressure. Dangerously low platelet levels. My body is tired of the fight. I'm estranged from that body, in a certain way. I am not done with living. I feel fully wrapped up in the lives of the people I made. I love reading. I love the fog this morning, rolling in across the corn field. My body is tired but I am going to ask more of it. I'm not estranged in the least from my body, in a certain way. I am in pain. I can feel the cancer in my bones, in my scapula and spine and hip and pelvis. I can't walk far right now and I don't know if my long walks through the bog with Sebby are now past, or if I will rebuild my strength. I can't stand in my beautiful kitchen and bake croissants like I did last fall--and they were beautiful. Rolling out the rectangle of butter between the layers of dough. I'm too fatigued to so that right now, never mind the chicken cutlets and shrimp tacos and pesto with pasta and the other dinners I made in the past. I would like to say that here, with me returning to writing, that I am also starting a slow return to the things I love to do. I'm not giving up when I say I'm not sure what is possible. When I started writing this particular entry, I was thinking about that night at Myrtle Beach in the late seventies. My memory of that is pretty strong, and I was thinking a lot about Plato's cave--where we live in a world where there is what is real and then there is how we interpret the real. Here, months later, surgeries and hospitalizations under my belt (sidebar--I was hospitalized last week with low platelets and the nurse I had the first day said she was excited to meet me because she had heard I was a great patient, who also unfortunately was a "bad stick." I am a bad stick now because my veins are filled with scar tissue, and apparently I am a good patient in the eyes of the nurses on the oncology wing. I'm a frequent flyer there, but the idea that I am a known quantity there really makes me want to get out more, frequent some museums or gardens maybe), anyhow, months later, I can't access the part of me that was terrified in South Carolina, any more than I can access the part of me which was ruminating on Plato's cave. These days I feel very clear about the universe. I can find God in the rustle of the cornfields on a dark night and the sound of the owl hooting from the tall tree near our driveway. The people I have lost feel very close to me. I feel my grandmother shadowing me these days. They say that the dying often talk of traveling, murmur about trains and suitcases and packing. I don't do any of that yet. But I do hold life very close right now. I don't imagine an abyss if I turn my head quickly; if I could look into the eyes of the white whale, the baleful empty gaze that so frightened Ahab would not be there for me. I can look into the eyes of my children, the various browns and hazels, the long lashes, and I see love reflected back. What more evidence could I want?