Author: anwari11

My grandmother’s home was at the top of a two-story wooden stairway in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania. When I visited, I was always a small child, starting at the bottom of an endless stairway leading to a landing I could see only when I reached the tenth step. My father would follow me, laden with suitcases, my mother bringing up the rear. When my foot reached the landing, my grandmother would be standing there, stout legs bound in some sort of black cotton hose, her round softness leaning down to engulf me in a tent of pillow and fabric, smelling of sweat, something a bit acrid and something that smelled like the moment you pull a carrot from the earth.

There would be hugs and wafts of conversation above me, some in a language I didn’t understand, some in the language I did but that sounded mysteriously like the language I didn’t. This mass of movement, weight and flow would go through the old screen door, smelling of dust and wood without paint, my grandmother’s hand, sticking in my memory, pushing on the aging gray wood around the ancient screen, and we would be suddenly inside in her kitchen, my father taking a bag up the stairs at the back near the stove to the rooms above.

My mother would sit for a moment in a cracked, padded chair at the kitchen table, with its red oilcloth hanging over the edges. I might lean against her, absorbing the smells of the house, the blackness of the huge coal stove that dominated the back corner of the kitchen, cold at the moment, patient, the counter taking up the whole of one wall, lined with objects covered with patterned dish cloths, still sending out muffled odors of meat cooked with potatoes, onions and carrots, warm pastry, vinegar, and the rich smell of cakes made with filbert flour. I waited, breathing, while they talked about the trip and the health of Mr. Djingalevski, the storekeeper who lived below.

I waited patiently, fully at peace, for my grandmother to come over to me and take my hand. Then she would lead me across the kitchen, up the narrow stairs and into her small bedroom. There I could see on the feather bed a new, small stuffed horse, always the same simple pattern, made of colorful fabric, mane, tail and eye made of the same yarn. I climbed into the bed, boosted by my grandmother’s softly fat arms, to take possession of this new member of a growing herd. With my gift clutched to my chest, we would go back down the stairs where my grandmother would sit heavily in her wooden rocker and pat her lap for me to come up as my father came back down the stairs to join us.

There I would stay while she rocked with one arm around my shoulders, my head between her bosoms where I could hear the hollow reverberation of her Polish-English and breathe in her rich, earthy smells as she talked with my father. He would be unpacking, with some ceremony, the bag of gifts we’d brought her. He’d first pull out, with dramatic flair, the old blue glass face cream jar he always carefully re-filled with white Jergen’s face cream, offered as a new jar of some now unattainable favorite. Then a bottle of vodka, maybe a dress my mother had picked out for her, meat, some fresh vegetables if they were in season. After the ritual, we’d sit and talk as she left me in the rocker to get plates of sweets from the sideboard, with milk from a bottle that always tasted so different from the milk I drank back at home, and coffee and maybe a vodka for my father. She arranged it all on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Always more food, there would be sandwiches and fresh cucumber pickles with dill and sour cream until we couldn’t eat anymore.

Then she would take us down the wooden stairs to the back yard to see the garden. As we walked, she would stoop once or twice to pull something from the grass, always a four-leafed clover she would reach back to hand me, with a slight smile I could catch only quickly as she turned away. If it were still late summer or early autumn, she would pull me a huge orange carrot, break off the leaves, rub it on her apron and offer it to me to eat, the smell of earth and taste of earth and orange sweetness mixed with the pungent fragrance of turning leaves. Over the houses in the next yard, over some trees in the mid-distance, loomed glowing mountains of black stones, smoking and steaming, sending up some strange smell of rotten eggs and smoke. Sometimes I remember a crow, calling from the tree in the back corner of the yard, somehow part of the background of misty emanation, the voice of the slag heaps with their steaming fumes.

This afternoon I stood at the kitchen sink and watched several small mobs of birds fly around over the field, back and forth, up and down, each individual a part of a whole guided by wind, following the movements of their nearest neighbors, swooping up and down, back and forth in patterns of unison. As I watched, I knew it must generate a kind of ineffable and inherent joy.

And now I’d like to tell you another extraordinary ordinary thing. Many, many years ago, I spent a summer in Ithaca, NY, caring for the child of a Pakistani woman, Saadia, who was studying for her Ph.D. at Cornell. I lived with her, her three-year-old-son who had named himself Sana, and her auntie, Bibijon.

The three months I spent there was for me a kind of retreat, a pause. When I arrived, I knew little about this small family other than Saadia had known a man called Samuel Lewis, a Sufi master and great teacher who had died the year before in San Francisco. In the days that followed, Saadia told me more of their history, how Bibijon, although an aunt just a few years older than she, had taken on her guardianship, care and protection when Saadia’s parents had died suddenly when she was still a teenager. She told the story of how, when Bibijon herself was three, she had fallen from a second story window when her Ayah was distracted. She had barely survived and was left with a partially paralyzed left arm that became withered over time and a limp on her left side. As a grown woman, she was like some beautifully made marionette whose puppeteer held one side slightly crumpled in against her body with a skillful twist of his hand. Then, around the age of six or seven, she had fallen into a well whose cover was accidentally left partially open. With her functioning arm, she managed to grab a cross bar inside the well as she dropped. She hung on with that one arm for over an hour, yelling for help, before she was finally rescued. For all this, she never complained, only took care of those she loved.

Saadia had been a young girl, maybe nine years old, at the time of Partition, the British solution to the problems they had created during the process of leaving India. Muslims and Hindus who had lived together amicably for millennia were whipped into incredible acts of violence against each other. She and her family had been among those Muslims hastily packed onto trains so overcrowded that people rode on top of the railway cars. They traveled this way for several days, through dangerous territory, where Hindus were killing and raping Muslims and Muslims performing equally violent acts against their former Hindu neighbors. They were being driven away from their home in India to the newly created Pakistan, to the city of Lahore. Like so many, they did not want to leave their ancestral home. They, too, had had their role to play in achieving Independence. Meanwhile, millions of Hindus were leaving their ancestral homes in what was now Pakistan to move in the opposite direction, sometimes with moments’ notice. Most people left behind everything except what they could carry in a small bag. It is often called the largest human migration in history–an estimated ten million altogether. More than a million people probably died during the violence that resulted from Partition, some in their ancestral home, some on the trip. Saadia spoke little about it.

I imagine the family must have settled well into their new home over the years. They had always been highly respected, devout, well-educated and generous to the community. They built a fine new home which they named Bhallah House. It is clear they resumed their position as respected community members, probably contributing to the creation of a new government in this new country. It is an era of her history, the time she had spent with the parents she’d lost too soon, about which she never spoke. She did speak, however, without vanity, of her beauty as a young woman and her pride in the fact she had been the first Pakistani woman to marry a “foreigner”. She had married a handsome American man she had met during her years of study. He had converted to Islam and they had a wedding of great extravagance and beauty in Lahore, publicized throughout the country. They returned to Ithaca soon after so Saadia could complete her studies. It was there she began to realize with increasing clarity that her new husband suffered tragically from manic depression. That summer, a year before my stay, he had managed to purchase a gun from a local gun shop despite Saadia’s attempts to alert the community to the possibility and shot himself in the head in the woods near their home.

That summer when I was twenty-three, they were continuing to hear this shot echo through their lives every moment of every day, although no one would be able to tell looking in. Bibijon spent her days in the small student housing apartment near the campus, cooking, cleaning, praying and talking quietly and intimately with Saadia. She was a tiny woman. I could embrace her whole frame between my shoulders and gently fold her in as if holding a bird in my hand. Even though Sana was now getting bigger, with a round head of dark, curling hair, and she could not carry him, she would sit with him on the bed when he cried, her good arm around him, thumping him rhythmically on the back with her paralyzed hand, sometimes singing quietly in Urdu. I would watch him respond with his whole body, calming, sinking deep into her chest, his sobs becoming sharp in-breaths. Very soon you could hear the relaxed breathing of near sleep. When mothers visited with colicky babies, she walked them, holding them closely and tightly to the soft part of her shoulder, thumping their small backs in a surprising way, always quieting them when no one else could.

One night a week or so into my stay, Bibijon made a soup based on a rich broth made of lamb livers from the Hallel butcher, seasoned with a mixture of spices only she knew, some variation on the infinite combinations that make up the concept of Curry. Its aroma had filled the house since lunch time, incredibly enticing, inducing embarrassing stomach rumblings even when no hunger was possible. Finally, dinner time arrived. On the one small patch of floor with no furniture, Saadia spread, as usual, a beautiful flowered cloth reserved for meal time. As she and Bibijon laid table settings (I was forbidden, still treated as a kind of guest), I sat cross-legged next to the cloth. Then the brought heaping bowls full of soup and plates of cooked greens from the tiny kitchen area and, laying them on the cloth, came to join me, chatting companionably, pulling their saris around their legs. Sana perched on a bed with a small plate of finger foods near him, Saadia and Bibijon taking turns feeding him broth from a small cup, he smiling and making sounds of satisfaction. After dinner, he was put to sleep with singing and Saadia, Bibijon and I sat talking, comfortably arranged on the beds grouped together in one room, Sana’s breathing like the presence of a small, warm animal.

A sense of completeness, of perfect comfort and peace, had settled with the evening, a feeling of another time, another culture. After talking for a while about their lives in Lahore, Saadia asked me to talk more about my own life, to know each other better she said. What they had spoken to me about their lives had been frank and straightforward. It would clearly be ungracious and ungenerous not to reciprocate. Their lives together had been full both of wonders and of horrendous grief. I was a young woman, raised in the privilege of the American middle class who had taken risks in ways only the secure can take. There were things that had happened in my life in the last year—events that had left me shamed and devastated—I had spoken of to no one outside the circle of my family and my closest friend. With these women from a background so sheltered, so distant from chosen risks, I had kept this world in me hidden, as if it might defile them. But in that moment of infinite capacity, I was conscious for the first time of my thoughts filing past through my mind as if on a ticker tape and for the first time of innumerable times to come, I instructed my mouth, despite its reluctance, to open and speak whatever it would. The words formed themselves and somehow burst their bounds. The story, the details, the emotions, I observed as they emerged as if a story from someone else’s life. As I spoke, Saadia translated softly for Bibijon whose English was rudimentary.

As I told it, the narrative became increasingly clear, and again for the first time, I recognized the volcanic aspect of the experience, how it had vomited forth the entire collection of building blocks I had carefully arranged during my adolescence. Here I was then, without justification, without defense. Bibijon nodded again and again as somehow she began to understand the reason for the tears now running down my cheeks and onto my shirt. Touching her paralyzed hand to the middle of her chest, she motioned to me with the other, patting the edge of the bed beside her.

“Come. Come.”

As if magnetized, pulled, I went to sit close to her, and she, taking me with her strong hand, pulled me gently to the floor, pulling my head against her knees. As I had come towards her across the room, I had seen some light in her eyes, not quite of sadness. Her eyes held me with a penetrating clarity as I had approached her from across the room, only seeing, nothing else. Surrounding my shoulders with her paralyzed arm, she now began to sing softly, holding me firmly against her and patting my back solidly with her other hand. thumping as if pounding some certain note into the enclosure of my body. Saadia, too, began to sing. Any sense of self dissipated as a fog disappears in a light wind. There was nothing to do but sink into the enormity of this stillness as grief opened itself like a dark blossom.

One bird called from some tree in the darkness. All others had roosted for the night.

Before I go on, I have to tell you something about my granddaughter.

No, no! I know, but I really have to tell you!

She sings opera. No, not like the kinder whizzes on the internet who stun you by singing ‘O Mio Bambino Caro’. She sings about the things happening in her day, the things she likes, what she feels, what she sees. She improvises. It’s a kind of arioso (“a light airy melodic commentary”), like a recitative but more musical and without the repetitions. We sing together or take turns. And she dances.

She has danced since she was only able to sit in her infant seat, rocking her body and waving her arms to the music of the French children’s songs her mother sang to her. When she could stand and then walk she danced to anything with intrinsic music—music itself, the rhythm of a dishwasher, the light dancing in the pool at the rose garden. All of life’s rhythms inspire some joyous response in her bones, in her cells. At her grandpa’s sixty-fifth birthday, when she was not yet two, she danced for hours in the middle of the living room, first to the guitarist playing in the corner, then to the recorded music, then to the rhythm of conversation and laughter, a spirit delighting in herself and the elation of music and movement. Now at three, when, yesterday, she was invited to a rock music fest, she danced with everything she has, swaying her hips, moving her feet in time with the music, ignoring everything else. Then she sang about it all the way home.

Her mother called us last night to pass on the joy of it all, her father and Lina playing in the background. Lina got on the phone and we talked about the apples, grapes and plums we had sent home with her a few days ago. She reported she had eaten them all. Then she asked, “How are you doing, Baba? What did you do today?” A rosy heat suddenly glowed like a wood stove fire being lit in my chest, the same sensation I remember from so many moments when my daughter was little, the sense that laughter, barely suppressible, was bubbling up from somewhere deep in my chest, driven by the delight that springs up from surprise, fed to some ridiculous degree by love. I told her about writing and working in the garden. “Wow!” she said. “I love you,” we told each other. She

A rosy heat suddenly glowed like a wood stove fire being lit in my chest, the same sensation I remember from so many moments when my daughter was little, the sense that laughter, barely suppressible, was bubbling up from somewhere deep in my chest, driven by the delight that springs up from surprise, fed to some ridiculous degree by love. I told her about writing and working in the garden. “Wow!” she said. “I love you,” we told each other. She asked “What are you doing now?” I explained we were sitting at the dining room table and Grandpa was trying out his new Fitbit that told him how fast his heart was beating. “Why?”, she asked. Walter replied, “Because he likes to.” She said, “I want to talk to Grandpa.” “What are you doing, Grandpa?” “Why do you need to know about your heart?” By this time, all four of the adults on both sides of the phone connection were feeling something like the people seated around the tea table in the scene in Mary Poppins when the table rises with each new crescendo in their laughter. Somehow we were managing, just barely, to keep our faces composed. We knew that if we didn’t use our best

By this time, all four of the adults on both sides of the phone connection were feeling something like the people seated around the tea table in the scene in Mary Poppins when the table rises with each new crescendo in their laughter. Somehow we were managing, just barely, to keep our faces composed. We knew that if we didn’t use our best grown-up restraint there would certainly be a stern, “Don’t laugh at me! It’s not funny!” which we would have to then say was true, even though we knew her entire being points directly to the real source of laughter.

Walter handed me the phone with a shrug and a smile and I, to distract her from her vigorous line of questioning which we struggled to make out over the phone,  asked if she could sing me a song.

“Which song?” she replied.

From the room on the other end of the phone I heard her mother say,

“Your own song. The kind you make up.”

Prompted, she began her opera. It went on for some time, about the dancing, and the apples, and her mommy and her daddy, playing soccer (she can already dribble down the field and kick a ball dropped onto her feet), her grandpa and everything. I wandered from room to room for awhile on speaker phone so Walter could hear.

We had to distract her again to end the song or it would have gone on and on into the night. It would have been a wonder, but even flowing brooks need to come to rest for awhile in quiet pools.

Tomorrow I will tell you stories about other grandmothers, connected as they are.

In honor of today, my daughter’s birthday.

When we arrived at the wonderful old hotel, the weather was perfect–a bright blue, buff and green summer afternoon with a light wind off the ocean which was just the other side of the three story, wooden, green-painted Sylvia Beach Hotel. It had stood there calmly near the Yaquina Light House since 1913, its big wooden framed windows taking in the surroundings. Now it was a literary themed hotel, each bedroom designed around a different author.

Years before, we had been travelling around the coast and had peeked in to the hotel. I was intrigued. Around my daughter’s tenth birthday, thinking of places I could take her for a weekend all to ourselves, I had remembered the place with fondness, imagined the walks on the long stretch of beach, collecting shells and rocks, and decided it was just the setting.  The E.B White room was even the cheapest room, and thus the one we could afford. This had made me especially happy. As a kid of eight or nine, I had read every one of his books for children.  Then I had read them all aloud to my daughter— Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan—both of us reveling in his wonderful language and his beautifully drawn characters.   White was an icon in my childhood home, growing up with a father who was steeped in the world of literary editors, contemporary authors and the craft of writing—E.B. White, the eminently intelligent staff writer for The New Yorker, essayist, humorist and generally the model for clear, sparkling direct language with wit and wisdom. I associated him with my father’s old Royal typewriter with its solid black letters sitting in each of the huge white, round keys on long curving metal stems.

The host took us outside and around to the corner of the building where she opened an outside door and let us in to our room. As I lugged our old bags and a big plastic cooler through the door I thought “We’re here for two whole nights! We have all this time just to ourselves to do whatever we want!”  No mouths to feed, no work to go to, no places to run the kids. There were the two beds in a small, cozy room with a shelf full of White’s complete works, including “The Elements of Style” and his books of essays. There was a model of a trumpeter swan and a stuffed Stuart Little.  And then there was the old, black Royal typewriter, just like my father’s, sitting on a small wooden writing table.  I had found my heaven.

We put our clothes in the painted dresser and decided on a short nap after the long drive. We snuggled into a bed with lots of pillows and I read most of the first chapter of Stuart Little aloud before putting it beside me on the bed and closing my eyes.

When we awoke, the sun had gone up the dome of the sky to the other side of the hotel. It was late afternoon with the sun’s rays beginning to slant across the hotel, casting its biggest shadow. A perfect time for a walk on the beach. We put on bathing suits, shorts and salt water sandals and took a canvas bag with snacks and camera and headed around the side of the building to the path through to the beach grass. The smell of the salt and of fish made us skip, holding hands until the sand got too deep and we stumbled, laughing.

We ran down to the water, took off our sandals and waded into the cold, cold Pacific water, waves sucking in and out over the rocky sand, the smells of brine and seaweed rushing up our nostrils, the wind catching our hair. We didn’t go in very far. Too late in the day to attempt a real swim, but it was our baptism, splashing water on our faces and tasting the salt as it clung to our lips. That night we ate in our room, read aloud and chatted in the dark till we slept. After I no longer got answers to my questions, I drifted into that twilight before sleep, watching inside to see who this was in this moment, outside of the routine of life. There resting in my chest was kind of warm rosy light. I sank into it gently, as I would into the embrace of a lover.

The morning brought sun in through our southern window. I woke up early as usual, full of the kind of anticipation I’ve felt traveling in a foreign country. She woke more slowly, rumpled with sleep, smiling. Even on our tight budget with the extravagance of a hotel, I decided we would go out for breakfast and buy ourselves some special picnic food for lunch.  We sat together in a little beach town café, she eating pancakes and I eggs, toast and bacon, talking about this and that, the new school she would be attending, her little brother, looking forward to a trip to the aquarium. What was this mother self? How was it different from the self I step into, like a full-body jump suit when I get up in the morning, preparing for a day as a therapist in a city hospital? Who is this person facing me, poised in those moments before the opening of her body and mind into young womanhood, someone I had known since she somehow received the first impressions of sound, sensation and light enclosed within the dark sea of the womb, since I greeted her essence inside me, since my first hungry look into the dark blue of her newborn eyes, still turned inward toward those internal realms of the sea, reflecting the lights of the outside world rather than fully absorbing them.  She was now a consciousness with an attachment to the experiences gleaned each successive moment, rubbing up against all those other selves wandering around in the world. .

What was this mother self? How was it different from the self I step into, like a full-body jumpsuit when I get up in the morning, preparing for a day as a therapist in a city hospital? Who is this person facing me, poised in those moments before the opening of her body and mind into young womanhood, someone I had known since she somehow received the first impressions of sound, sensation and light enclosed within the dark sea of the womb, since I greeted her essence inside me, since my first hungry look into the dark blue of her newborn eyes, still turned inward toward those internal realms of the sea, reflecting the lights of the outside world rather than fully absorbing them.  She was now a consciousness with an attachment to the experiences gleaned each successive moment, rubbing up against all those other selves wandering around in the world. At some point in our sitting there together, I felt myself take a deep breath, as if reawakening to my surroundings, a café with windows looking out on a sunny street, families walking by, looking for their next enjoyment. I  paid the bill and we got into the car to drive to the aquarium.

What I remember is the cylindrical tank in the middle of a big room where transparent jellyfish, the size of the largest glass mixing bowls turned upside down, hung suspended in the salty brine. We stood transfixed, pointing out the intricacies of the light gleaming through each sack of protoplasm, bouncing off their long dangling glass tentacles, puddling in spots in the dusky water. Then there were the astonishing symmetries of their internal organelles, rings of transparent circles as if a glass blower had worked magic and put glass forms suspended inside glass spheres. The dance of the light and form enchanted us and we stood, moving around the tank slowly to see them in the different angles of light and perspective as groups of people came and went through the room, looking, commenting, ooing and ahing, laughing briefly with delight. \

We watched the sea otters in their large rocky pool, diving, swimming around each other, floating on their backs. We made eye contact with several, entering for a moment into a consciousness that experiences the world as if filtered through a smile. Their sense of humor permeated even the act of eating a clam. We saw sharks swim, drew in the brilliant colors of tropical fish and walked in the sparkling sun and dappled shade of the gardens of native plants outside. Hungry, we went back to the car and broke open our picnic of bread, cheese and turkey, sitting at a picnic table, laughing about what we’d seen.

I think we went back to our room then and took a nap, getting up soon to get out to the beach while it was still hot enough to dry out after a cold swim. My daughter and I both were creatures of ocean. She had learned to swim as a baby in our town in Southern California, underwater paddling with eyes wide open and bright. She’d loved to swim around in the warm water of the bay, where I swam out with her, side by side. I spent my earliest summers on the beaches of Cape Cod, in and out of the waters of ocean and lake all day, for a couple of summer weeks each yer. We swam now, the water piercingly cold, sputtering, laughing, challenging each other to swim a little longer. When we couldn’t take the cold another second, we walked out delicately over the rocky bottom. Spreading our towels, we lay for a bit in the hot sun, warming, relaxed.  The itch to explore the beach soon overcame me and we pulled on our shorts and tops over quickly drying bathing suits, gathered up our towels in our bag and set out.

The long spread of the sand, the expanse of water to the horizon, the dark rocks and cliffs within reach at the limit of our view, the smells, the warm air with barely a breeze, the patterns made by swarms of sandpipers running in groups in the surf, the sounds of sea birds, an occasional hawk screeching, children laughing, all combined to open some experience, some realm of perception so expansive that nothing was external. Both absorbed by this mysticism of ocean, we walked barefoot through the water, feeling the waves tickling back and forth over and under our feet, finding rocks of colors that exist nowhere else but under water, taking our time.

We finally arrived at the curve of the beach covered by a large, brown and gray rock formation, dotted with pools now at low tide, a rock cliff rising on the landside. Down the cliff thin streams of water tumbled, making a shower of  cold water beneath.

We each found our own pool to study, one that drew us, so we could sit as long as we liked to observe the world of water bugs, sea stars, sea urchins, feeding barnacles, mollusks, sea weeds and tiny fish for as long as it took to grasp the sense of this infinite network. Then, ready to shake ourselves, she took off her shorts and tee-shirt and, full of sheer delight, walked under the trickling shower from the stream above. I followed, both squealing. We lay down on the warm rocks to dry again, looking up into the sky above the cliff where a tall beach pine curved up from the grassy area on the cliff-top.

I watched as a Peregrine soared up above the tree on a current of air rising over the ocean. Then another joined it. I called to my daughter, absorbed by something in the pool beside her, to watch. Resting on air streams  between earth and water, gliding with wings spread perfectly, balanced and still, they came closer together with imperceptible movements, flying in tandem as if two fighter planes. As we watched, they both turned upside down in formation, spinning over in parallel, once, twice, miraculously, joyously. Propped now on our elbows, eyes riveted upwards, it was as if the exuberance of their joy transmitted itself directly through the molecules of air separating us. We flew with them.

It lasted for a brief moment or two, then they were gone, flying up and beyond the stretch of the cliff. We turned to each other in our astonishment, having shared something so rare and precious we knew it to be unbelievable. The afternoon had created an opening neither of us had imagined.

That evening, we ate in the little restaurant in the hotel, windows overlooking the beach, our one restaurant dinner. As if we were two grownups on vacation, we ate fish, I drank wine and we watched the sun set over the Pacific, warmly, gorgeously.  After dinner, we walked in the moonlit dark on the beach, playing with the water as we went. As we strolled, feeling the weightlessness of such atmosphere, she asked if she could tell a story. “Of course!” I said, and she began. She told her story for a while, perhaps of horses in the water, maybe unicorns, given her age. It was a story woven directly from her imaginings as they unwound into the night.

She stopped walking, stopped her story and said, “You tell it for a while.”

I picked up the story. It shifted, new characters emerging, lives developing.  We went back and forth like this for some time, until we began to realize we’d come quite a way down the beach and the sleepiness was beginning to overcome us. The story was losing its life. Before we turned back, still in the mood of going into the vastness, she asked me, “Could we do this again?”  I replied, “Oh yes. Maybe we could even write a book together.” “Oh yes,” she said. “Let’s do that!”

Those moments are imprinted in the memory of what I know to be the thread of this self, this one I inhabit still, joined by that cord of energy to this other self who has become a woman. She carries the same imprint somehow within her, stamped somewhere in the vastness of the interior.

The day before yesterday was the twelfth anniversary of my daughter’s wedding. It was a hot day in Portland that year as it had been twenty-one years earlier when my daughter and I arrived in our new home in the Northwest in another July. On that day, we had traveled together for a week from Long Beach, California, up the Pacific Coast Highway all the way.

She was three at the time, just as my granddaughter is now. The sides of my abdomen were just thickening with the pregnancy that would be my son. Her father had gone ahead to start his new job and we had said good-bye to all our friends. I hadn’t wanted to leave. Life had been good in the warm weather on the bay with plenty of families around us with young children.  But life turned on its own events.  I decided to make the best of the time I had alone with my daughter. We would have a long road trip, wandering up the coast, stopping wherever fancy lead us.

Our household belongings had gone ahead in a moving van so I packed our bags for the week into the back of our Nissan and pulled out of our driveway in the old part of town for the last time. We were on the road! She was excited, in the back in her car seat.  She yelled “Bye everyone! Bye house!”

The trip started with familiar landmarks, the road out of town, then taking the long way through San Pedro and Seal Beach with the roiling landslide-heaved roadway, the two of us yelling the usual “Whee!” here and there as the road dipped and pitched. The sky was nearing blue as always in July before ten am, day after day, when the low morning clouds rolled off. The temperature was climbing, but not yet hot. We stopped to take a walk down the path to the beach where we came often to play in the sand and look for shells in the water. She ran ahead with her bucket down the wide trail, wispy hair blowing in the same rhythms as the sea grasses rasping in the breezes.  It was still morning. Plenty of time. No rush. Nowhere to be. We might just get to Morro Bay that day or maybe we’d find something else to woo us.  She ran to the water’s edge, the waves hissing in at her feet, and stood for a moment, pail at her side and shovel lifted as if in unconscious salute. We walked through the water for a while, side by side, splashing the moving water with our feet, then sat on a towel and had a bit of snack.  We waved good-bye to the beach with its odd old concrete wreck of a building, surrounded by a few crumbling concrete tables with shredded old fake bamboo umbrellas leaning this way and that.  I felt as if we were leaving some secret ruin we had discovered, still unexplored by others, our special spot where we’d told stories and made things up, now to be left for others to defile.

We travelled for just a few hours that day, taking Route One all the way around the big airport, up through Santa Monica, past Will Rodgers Beach, singing Raffi songs and pointing out things along the way.  Around Santa Monica, I’d decided to stop at my favorite restaurant for lunch at a place in Topanga Canyon with decks arrayed around a stream and “whole food”.  It was a splurge. We were doing that.

We had a leisurely lunch, with me even sipping a glass of white wine, until she began to get a little cranky. Time for a nap. We head off up the road. After she’d fallen asleep, I pulled over in a spot near Malibu that smelled of eucalyptus and had one of my own short naps to take the edge off.

I’m not sure I remember how far we got that day, but I remember the road trip games, one spotting animals and earning points based on the different species. Camels and elephants were one hundred points. We saw both that day. She got one and I go the other. I think she got the camel, the most exotic by our count. We laughed and maybe I cried a bit to myself, I’m not sure.

I’m pretty sure we stopped for another look at Hearst Castle the second morning, spending the most time looking at the swimming pool and the strange plants. We indulged in everything we wished, ice cream, beer, lingering over things that made sense to no one but us.

We meandered. We stopped when either of us saw something that drew us.  “Look at that, Mommy!” she’d point. I’d slow and if there was anything I could identify and we’d pull over and take a look. We walked on the beach at Big Sur and felt the wind and got absorbed by all the life in the tide pools. We drove the famous drive in Carmel and stopped at the Lone Pine to take photos.  We went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco and spent a few hours doing almost everything that could be done. We may have flown a kite in the Golden Gate park. That night, I think we made it to my friend Stephen’s in Palo Alto where she ran around and had a swing with me in the elevated chair he’d built that could be pulled up to the clerestory in the ceiling. We swayed back and forth getting a little woozy with the height.  My friend and I stayed up late talking while she went to sleep in the cozy nest of the loft.  The next morning, he rode her on the seat his wooden home-made bike and we left after breakfast, waving to him, his wife and stepson as we pulled out of the drive.

We went to the beach at Point Reyes as we’d done in the past. She had eaten sand there as a one-year-old. Now we joked together about it. We stopped at the Monterey Aquarium to admire the otters for at least an hour.  We stopped at gift stores, at any roadside attraction that didn’t look pornographic or crassly commercial, we picnicked and had an elegant dinner here and there, she sipping Shirley Temples. We were road companions of the best sort, forging our friendship further, she a novice at life and language and I on break from profession and the prescribed activities of parenting.

As we got into the woods of the northern California coast we stopped at Trees of Mystery, playing together among the weird forms despite the other tourists. Then we stopped in the Redwood State Park. I saw again how actually tiny in stature my road companion was, there among the huge Oxalis leaves that looked like a giant’s clover, she stood, head tilted back, round blond head, pudgy arms hanging at her sides, eyes taking in the sheer enormity of it all. “What do you think?” I asked. I don’t believe she was able to answer, totally dazed as she was. An old couple wandered through. The woman stood and looked at her for several moments before looking at me in the eyes, straight, deep, with a smile more in her eyes than on her lips. She turned and joined her husband as they wandered slowly, engulfed in the same awe.

That night, we found a small motel by the river with little log cabins and a swing set. We took a wonderful, cold refreshing swim together in the river where it slowed and eddied along the banks. Others were there, bathing in the evening sun filtering through the great trees pushing in towards the water. We ate sandwiches and climbed into the big, high bed. The movie “Gandhi” was on. We snuggled and watched it together, she asking questions as Ben Kingsley led the salt protest march to the sea and spoke to hundreds at an ashram. She fell asleep after a bit and I clicked off the TV, lying beside her in the dark, cool evening, listening to the river.

We explored the Sea Caves where the mad barks of seals echoed through huge rooms in the rocks like halls of an ancient castle, smelling of urine and seal feces. We stood by the ocean in Oregon and listened to the waves crash on the rocks.  We both still remember the surprise of finding a roadside “State Site” created especially for the Darlingtonia Carnivorous Plants that grow only in that one limited bog, their bright green hooded bulbous forms creating a perfect water trap for insects and adapted with leafy structures that resemble fangs or a serpent’s forked tongue, making them look beautifully like a hooded cobra.  We stopped at light houses and climbed at least one, wondering at the people who had lived there, tending the motion of the huge reflecting light. We stopped at a petting zoo. And finally, about a week after our good-bye to Long Beach, we arrived at our strange new suburban house in Vancouver Washington, over the river from Portland, in a place where there was no ocean to bathe in of an afternoon, no eucalyptus or palm trees, no hot sun beating down, and no friends to walk to in the evening. We would see.