I began a new series of stories last night. They are at present a series of anecdotes, told from the perspective of a friend, Holden, who has experienced psychosis and remains paranoid. In recent weeks he has become concerned about surreptitious and sinister white vans which appear in his driveway, and are perhaps of indifferent purpose. He feels under the eye of six or seven Ethiopians. Once, at a party, I saw Holden throw contact lens solution into a bowl of punch, and turn, wild eyed, at the surrounding crowd: "That's LSD." Holden then, with some violence, jerked his head around on his neck, and spat at the revelers, growling, "I've contracted HIV." None of this was unusual, at the time, as five or six close friends had begun to manifest certain symptoms of serious mental disorders (we were all twenty, twenty-one). It was par for the course.
A few days ago I obtained the following information: a dear old friend, Oriane, decided she'd had just enough, stepped out of her bed, and walked out of the nursing home--this is neither metaphor nor hyperbole. Oriane was born some years before 1920, the daughter of a well-known naturalist and photographer. Oriane and my grandfather were great friends and bitter friends, each lusting for the spotlight, each full of wit, levity, and tales to last long into the night. I saw Oriane over the summer, and I did believe it would be the last time we would meet--months earlier she had fallen and broken a few bones, and, in disbelief and rage (at ninety-something she lives alone, perfectly capable and competent) she threw herself onto her bed having resolved to die. She spoke to no one for twenty-four hours, when a well-meaning acquaintance dropped in to assure all was well, and discovered all was, unfortunately, not. Oriane spent the next six-eight months in a nursing home, confined to her bed. When I saw her in August, though frail, she remained quick and sharp. For whatever reason I was full of aphorisms that day, and, after my aunt noted this, I told Oriane I was hard at work on a dictionary of axioms, observations, adages, and general pith. "I hope only you find someone out there to read it," she replied. I am elated to hear she has recovered.
Sadly, another old friend did pass away this year. She was an artist, scholar, musician, hippie den mother, organic farmer, lover of the shaggy, and inspiration to many--an Obie who went on to take her MA in Classical Greek and Latin from the University of Chicago, who would host musicians, poets, civil rights activists, rabble rousers and reds for late night philosophizing, music-making, and merriment on her farm, and remember (and remark) with pride that the FBI kept an eye on the goings-on at her house. She moved to my hometown in 1984, in her sixties, where she became a central figure on the scene with her Dobro, her sketchbook ("subjects festooned around the room"), and her beautiful, bright presence. We both were on-air talent at the very same radio station, and as an impressionable adolescent I watched her cat Millicent when B left town on occasion. We watched Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and I thank and think of B as one of many real-world saints who lighten the darkness for the rest of us. George Eliot says it best:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Goobye, B.
Goodbye, 2014.
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