Neither Here Nor There

When Jim told me he had cancer, it didn’t much worry me.  It was in his fingertip.  They amputated the digit at the joint, threw his cancer in the trash.  Good riddance.  His finger stump was intriguing; even cool in that weird “lemme see your scar” kind of way.

Turned out, that wasn’t the all of it.  The cancer popped up in places that couldn’t be lopped off.  But for a while the chemos worked fine, the tumors shrunk like magic.  It was looking good, till last winter.  Last winter, when the Dark rose with a vengeance and everybody’s shit hit the fan.  Jim called to say things weren’t looking so good, anymore.  His situation wasn’t hopeless, the docs still had plenty treatments to try.  But as I listened to the sad news with one ear, Jim’s obit tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in the other, “I’m yours to write.”

Yeah, well, I don’t work at no newspaper.  I don’t write obits ahead of time, don’t update them to keep them current.  Damned if I’d devote any brain cells to the announcement of his death while the man was still alive.

Jim died last Tuesday.

I never dreamed the Jim-obit would be so hard to write.  Never dreamed I’d need so much help to get it done.  It’s not grief blocking me, or denial.  I’m not reticent to let him go.  The problem is, my eulogy for Jim is all about me.

I met James Killus in 1970-something… maybe ’74… at a Mythopoeic Society meeting where young fantasy fans met to wax eloquent on the works of Tolkien, and sometimes about Lewis’ books, and, very occasionally, about the stuff Williams wrote.  James was witty, James was wry, James was opinionated to the max, and every opinion he held was backed by acerbic, insightful logic.

I’m not a group kind of gal.  I didn’t stick with the Mythopoeic thing long.  Years passed.  Lots of ‘em.  I graduated, worked, traveled, lived with my sister in the Rockies, with my honey in LA, got married, had kids, moved again, wrote a fantasy novel.  The book got me into a writer’s group — the Melville Nine.

Jim recognized me before I recognized him.  I just thought that bearded guy with the cap sure looked familiar.  Jim now had an exotic wife.  Amy wasn’t a writer, but she came to all the meetings and gave people back rubs.  At some point, I realized Jim and Amy were always together unless circumstances forced them apart.  They simply adored each other.  They were happier in each other’s company than alone.  When I was with Jim and Amy, I was in the presence of true love.

In its heyday, there were more than nine writers in the Melville Nine.  Only a handful of them gave constructive critiques.  Jim often came at a piece from a surprising angle — which was useful in itself — and his critical faculties were finely honed, his comments invaluable.  The Melville Nine went the way of all things, but I never stopped asking Jim to read my stuff and critique it.

Jim has been my best, closest and usually only writer-friend for 13+ years.  If you’re a writer, you know what that means.  If you’re not, no words can explain it.

Important things to know about Jim that won’t be in the official obit:  he was an expert on Bat Masterson, he had a bloody Engineering degree from RPI (the guy was smart), and he loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

Jim was a better friend to me than I ever was to him.  If too much time went by, he’d call to check in, to give news and get it, to share his writer triumphs and disappointments and inquire about mine.  He and Amy would come up to Sonoma sometimes.  We’d hang out, do dinner, get loaded, watch a flick, stay up, talk till all hours.  I virtually never returned the favor, almost never dropped in on them.  But Jim didn’t love me less because I’m a wanna-be recluse.  I never had to guard my tongue or mind my manners with him, never had to be less abrasive or more congenial, never had to try to act like someone I’m not.  With Jim, I didn’t have to feel bad about being tactless, unreasonable and odd.

Thanks, James, for being always and unconditionally my friend.

Jim Killus wrote tons of great stuff.  He longed for more response to his essays (at http://unintentional-irony.blogspot.com/).  It’s not too late; his wife Amy would love to hear what you think.   And do yourself a favor.  His two Ed Honlin novels (serialized on his website http://www.sff.net/people/james-killus/) are exceptionally good ”noir.”  Give them a read.

When the oak tree fell last December, it crushed my daughter’s car and robbed the potato vine of its fence.

The unsupported lianas have been heaped at the base of the oak tree’s stump ever since — a gigantic ball of brown twine with a few green threads stretched over the top.  We cut and stacked the tree, hauled away the broken fence boards, had the dead car carted off.  The vine-blob needed care, too, but being a durable plant that grows with vigorous, weed-like abandon, it didn’t demand my attention, and so, got none.

Till today.  Today I noticed happy new potato vine tendrils reaching straight up from the yellowed vine-branch trap that’s been catching dusty, dead leaves for nine months.  It didn’t strike me as an omen of rebirth.  I never imagined the potato vine was dead, for one thing.  For another, the tiny fringe of green wasn’t verdant enough to counterbalance Death’s scythe that cut off my uncle’s life only last Thursday, that yesterday cast a shadow of grief over my visit with one friend, a shadow of fear over my visit with another.  Yeah.  New green is great, but sprouting from a massive potato vine tumbleweed… not so good.  I started hacking away at it.

The lizard skins were hidden inside like white quartz crystals inside a stone.  The first was just a wisp; I mistook it for a tiny snakeskin.  The next had a bud where a tiny leg had been — it was lizard, but utterly dry, ready to crumble to flakes, to powder.  Realizing the bulbous vine-mound was home and cover for a wild creature and that I was destroying it gave me pause.  But my yard is large and wholly un-cared for; it offers a gazillion hiding places for a lizard in flight, and the vine was begging for more.

Three times the charm… and a fourth… then the five-fold magic — the most gorgeous, most complete lizard skin of all gracing the inmost chamber of dry, brown vines, still a bit moist, a bit soft, a bit flexible to the touch.  Waiting for me.  For us.  A gift.  An omen for the Equinox, and so much sweeter than the last omens I’d found.

With the same gentle hand-cage I use to catch moths and carry them outside, I carried the lizard skins inside the house and set them on the cold iron of my wood burning stove.  White and weightless as gossamer, brittle ghosts of the year grace my hearth with the blessings of life renewed.

Equinox Eve, Waning Hazel Moon

Lizard Skin Pentad

I don’t quite understand how people can justify taking a stand on one side or the other of the fate / free-choice fence.

Even if you believe the decisions we make about our lives are ordained, to claim that our reactions to events and situations are likewise and entirely pre-determined and that how we feel about our circumstances doesn’t involve choice is to deny that we can learn from experience.  Follow it to its natural conclusion, and the fatalistic argument relegates the human race to an infantile consciousness and pointless existence, where efforts to direct our intentions are doomed to fail, self-awareness is impossible and personal growth is an illusion.  Accept that our world is entirely manipulated by an external force beyond our control, and our desires, hopes, dreams and regrets mean nothing.

That said, I’m just as contemptuous of the philosophy that fate’s got nothing to do with it.  I believe in fate, utterly.  I’m a free-choice advocate only in that I consider reality a function of perspective.  I think we’re inherently free to choose how we face our destiny.  That’s the trick, that’s the ticket, that’s the job.  That’s what life’s all about — facing death.  I’m not being morbid.  That’s our Fate.  We’re born to die.

Sorry.  I got side-tracked on this one.  A note arrived just before I sat down to write, announcing another friend’s final journey.  I’d been ruminating on the forces beyond our control before the email arrived, but I’d been envisioning them as an orchestra conductor, not an iconic scythe-bearing ghoul…

Last May, when I well and truly burned out, I thought if I changed my circumstances, I’d change what was basically wrong with my life.  For the 10 months leading up to May, I’d been so effing busy, the only way I could manage it was to organize every single minute of every single day.  I raced from one place, one job, one task, one thing to another, non-stop — and got it to work, for a while.  Then, around February, somebody showed up 10 minutes late to a meeting, and the whole thing fell apart.  March through May was an endless series of dominoes going down.  The system was kaput.  I could never catch up again.

Yeah, but the point is, I’d imagined that if I changed how many jobs I was working and how far I was commuting, if I lessened my workload and altered my priorities, the every-fucking-minute-of-every-fucking-day routine would no longer rule my life.

It hasn’t worked out that way at all.  I’ve just gone through another full month of racing from one moment to the next, culminating in a weekend of 12-hour shifts to finish up the job application I need to turn in tomorrow, grade last week’s homework, prep for tomorrow’s class — and get it all done in time to write a blog and post it before midnight.

I am a highly organized individual with a keen sense of how much time specific tasks require.  I totally nailed it, in the managerial sense.  In the temporal sense, I’ve got no control at all.  Changing my circumstances changed my circumstances, period.  Fate’s decided the tempo for this phrase of my life.  All I can do is play along, strive to keep up with the baton’s breakneck pace, hope I don’t hit too many wrong notes, and pray the next movement is an Adagio.

I didn’t need the iteration.

Didn’t need to spend another entire effing day crunched at the computer slogging through endless business emails to realize that changing my job didn’t change anything — I’m still working too many hours for too little pay.

Didn’t need to catch sight of the unchopped wood under the deck, the dry-rotted stairs, the weather-worn railing, the too-bright floodlights in the driveway, the screaming-for-a-fresh-coat-of-paint walls, the shoddy futons, the lightless fridge, the duck-taped screens, or the black mold speckling the bathroom caulking to see how far behind I am in taking care of the house.

Didn’t need to go through the motions of giving myself permission to walk away from the mountains of work undone — the should’ve-finished-it-a-year-ago editing, the blank employment application (for a supplemental teaching post that holds as little promise of creative satisfaction as the post I hold now), the pending correspondence, the overdue updates for my website, my decaying-due-to-neglect novel — didn’t need to walk away from it all just to waste another night indulging in the hollow pleasure of viewing a film I’ve already seen.

Didn’t need the clock pointing out I’d once again let today slip into tomorrow without honoring my daily resolutions to eat better, exercise more and spend a few minutes in meditation.

Didn’t need visions of my old work-place haunting my sleep — didn’t need to see the theatre refurbished, remodeled, revamped, showing itself off to tour groups; didn’t need to watch my erstwhile production manager passing through the austere, mammoth lobby; didn’t need to hear my erstwhile cohort remark, “Yeah, he’s back.”  Didn’t need a lousy dream to recognize this real-world dead-end.

I’d got the message the first time.  This morning, walking the dog.  Just across the street from the house, I found blue jay feathers — pristine, perfect — scattered in the ivy and on the asphalt along with pale tufts of feathery-down and a few chunks of lichen-mottled oak.  An incensed adult jay, a parent, maybe, was screeching fury overhead.  Screeching and shooting straight and low over the trees like a fighter plane, honing in on another jay, chasing it off.

Death is an omen of rebirth.  Sometimes.  Not today.  Today the omens spoke to me of potential unrealized.  Of beauty marred.  Of a soul’s song unsung.  But it wasn’t the feathers that hit home, that touched the heart of me.  It was the portents waiting for me up the hill and around the bend.  What I’d failed to read into a young jay’s death I couldn’t miss in the green acorns fallen forever fruitless on the hard, gray road.