Yesterday's wonder was a bright
rainbow at the top of the Organ Mountains. (God's comment to the
Interior Department on keeping our monument as is?) Cameraless, I
tried to capture the image with my cell phone, but hadn't a clue how
to zoom in.
Today's is a roadrunner, crossing
Roadrunner Parkway then strolling into Caliche's parking lot,
straight toward the bench where I'm pigging out. I would tell him
that despite the street's name, motorists won't cut him much slack,
but he wouldn't listen. He turns and walks against traffic past the
drive-in window, headed for Subway. I pull out the cell phone, but
ain't any smarter about the zoom than I was last night.
It's been a funny afternoon. First I
record a radio interview with a friend, a Zen Buddhist roshi who'd
had little interest in spiritual matters until he lay long into the
night in a Vietnamese jungle with an four by two-inch oblong hole in
his head. (“I'm one of the few men who's reached in and touched
his own brain,” he laughs.) He struggled to stay awake in case of
another attack. For hours, he listened to the desperate cries of a
fellow soldier he himself had shot, when the fellow, without his
signal flashlight, came running toward him during the battle like a
charging enemy soldier.
We talk more than an hour about life
and death and meditation.
Then I go to the rehab establishment
where one of my closest friends is “imprisoned.” (His word.)
He's 86. Yesterday, he berated me for not having sprung him from the
place, and for urging him to do physical therapy. Today he smiles
and tells me he and the physical therapists have been having fun. “I
did a bunch of crazy things with my leg. Can't do any harm. It
won't do any good, but it can't do any harm.” He talks about his
father, a 6'7” New York City policeman who weighed 330 pounds and
held the world record in the shot put more than a hundred years ago.
He says cheerfully that he's dying. He asks about “the silly radio
station” and says he wishes there were an afterlife, so he could
watch the foolish antics of his earthly friends, “but I'm still an
atheist to the core.”
It's a good visit, although a nurse
tells me “he's still cantankerous.”
Yesterday, along with complaints about
food, the tiny TV, and the pointlessness of P.T., he was furious that
the young people working there “haven't a clue who James Cagney and
Doris Day were, but expect me to know about all their favorites.”
Bud taught cinema for decades. Today he's cheered when one young
therapist, an athlete, having googled Bud's father, chats with Bud
about athletes from different eras.
Has he passed through angry resistance
and come to terms with his reasonable belief that he'll die soon?
He's often said, as I'm leaving, that he won't be alive tomorrow.
Today he says that, but more quietly, with less bravado.
With a later visitor, he talks more
about his childhood, his dogs, and death. When she leaves she kisses
him and says, as she often does, “I love you.” Usually he
growls, “I can't think why.” Today he says, “If I make it
through the night, I'll tell you what that means to me.” When
she's almost out the door, he shouts, “I love you!”
His best friend for nearly a
half-century, I'm not sure I've heard him say that out loud. Maybe
he's finally stopped imitating Cagney and Bogart. We love you, man!
-30-
[The above column appeared in the Las Cruces Sun-News this morning, Sunday, 16 July, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website.]
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