Note: Pondo Woods

I wrote this in my pocket notebook out in the woods this afternoon:

I went for a walk today to "somewhere", where I thought there would be refuge but there was only my mind.

You can't walk away from your own mind. You can't walk away from what time and fate and genetics have made you. You might as well walk away from your own body.

It's quite lovely though, here in the Pondo Woods, along the river. The yellow leaves are fallen but there are yet leaves green and living; these woods are not yet the skeleton woods of winter.

I was one winter night, walking here once, shortly after one of my favorite mice had died, my last little passionately loved little mouse, when I had this odd thought: "This is the forest primeval, or oh how I wish it were, when Man could talk to Mouse" and so I said: "Pondo, this is your woods, the Pondo Woods, and some day we will speak," and even as I said it I laughed, that had Pondo ever been to this woods he would have been terrified. Adventure for him was delightedly climbing up and down in the sofa chair.

And yet this is to where I walked today hoping I might arrive somewhere and all I found was my mind and I knew that's what I would find yet this is to where I walked. I might as well have walked from out of my own body.

I do yet miss the little mouse. Standing in this woods, his woods, I miss the little mouse though I know he is buried miles from here in another woods though along the same river though on the opposite bank.

Things do seem wild.

To my mind, in my own way, this afternoon I touched on the elemental, and that has it's value.

And I think I'll include this...

Mom

"Honor thy father and thy mother that their days may be long upon the land which thy Lord thy God giveith thee."

I don't know the number of that commandment, I'm not that theologically up to speed, but my intent in the few words I speak now is to honor my mother. And I do know that to honor is sometimes just in the attempt and not in the achievement.

Ma had two remarkable capacities. One was that she was a good mother. She was good because she loved every one of her off-spring equally. Not in the same way --that would have been impossible, in that the personalities were so different-- and not with the same pleasure --some loves are more difficult than others-- but always with the same concern, the same consideration, the same force. Every sibling in this family knew that ma was their ma, that for them, specifically, ma had a special place in her heart.

This force, this fairness, this concern, extended beyond offspring; in the case of this family, to son's-in-law. Every husband brought into this family had a place in ma's heart. They belonged. It was because of this place in ma's heart, because of her centralizing maternal force, that our extended family, while ma yet was of sound mind, was a remarkable creation, a splendid pleasure.


I'd said that ma loved everyone equally... That's not true. She loved one guy especially. He was bald-headed.

I asked ma once how she had met dad. "At a barn dance." Apparently ma, cute as a bug though she was, was sitting alone along the wall somewhere and dad came up and asked her for a dance. No bells and whistles for ma, but she was interested. After the dance she went up into the balcony --since it was a barn that would have been the hayloft-- and looked down, watching dad on the dance floor. I asked her: "How could you do that, from above like that, with all those dancers on the floor?" She said: "I just followed the bald spot." --Ma was not put off by premature male pattern baldness, by that time she had already plucked from her head her first gray hair... She did think his nose was too big.

But if ma wasn't swept off her feet, dad was. He got some people to tell him where "that girl" lived, and followed her home. After that ma never had a chance. Dad knew he had a good one and he never let up. Soon they were married. Ma still thought his nose was too big.

Dad died April 15th. He had what could be called "a medical condition". Ma died June 8th . She did not have a medical condition, not anyway, one of any immediate concern. Her heart stopped. Judging by her naturally slow, solid rate of pulse, ma had the most powerful heart of anyone in the family. Yet it stopped.


So I've mentioned ma's two most remarkable qualities: That she loved her family, each equally, though not the same; and that she loved her husband. I assert that the one informed the other. That it was her love for her husband that empowered her love for her children. If that first love was to have power and meaning, its expression necessarily must be turned toward that which it had produced. Without the one there could not have been the other, and this, incidentally, was why the love was equal, because it was first of all merely an extension of that primary union. Putting it simply, we mattered because dad mattered... He never ceased to matter.


There was a third remarkable thing in ma's life, not anticipated, but I suppose not anticipated just because we all had sleeping intellects. Alzheimer's.

Alzheimer's is a heck of a disease. You slowly go from being the smartest person in the room, effortlessly in command of everything, to not being able to understand even the simplest conversation...simply because you can't remember. Ma could remember one sentence, if it wasn't too long. She couldn't remember two. Very few conversational entries are only one sentence long, so ma couldn't follow ordinary conversation and she seemed stupid.

I don't at all believe that was true.

Just because you've lost the memory capacity that makes possible accurate perception of the immediate, unfolding present doesn't mean that you've lost that deep base of understanding upon which you've structured your life. I put it this way. It's my conviction that ma's understanding was immensely beyond her communication. She couldn't put together a verbal coherence because a verbal coherence requires memory, which she didn't have, but it's my conviction that in deep things that truly mattered ma was as alert when she died as she had been years before when she was merely, and remarkably, just "Ma".

So what happened?

Ma knew dad was dead. We never told her. That may have been poor judgment on our part but we never told her because we thought she would just forget. She would experience shock, she would experience grief, and then the next day she would ask "Where's dad?" and we would have to go through it all over again. But I noticed that ma, once she came off of sedation, once she recovered from her tracheotomy and could ask "Where's dad?" only persisted for a short number of days, and then ceased. She had understood our evasions. She knew dad was dead. She never said a thing about that understanding. That was ma. She kept important things to herself.

And in her last week, in her last five days, she knew where she was, knew why she was there, knew she had cancer and knew she was there for no purpose but to die. And she never said a thing.

I'm told that in that last five days she was constantly loving, warm, and agitated. I'm told that in that last five days her sleep was monitored and that she couldn't have slept more than three hours in that entire time. Ma's mind, in a deep sense, was racing.


In Alzheimer's there's a question of how much soul remains once the body, the neural matter of the brain, has disintegrated and robbed the brain of mind. I've thought about this and my thoughts are not clear. I do know that for many years the disintegrating body did have the upper hand and robbed ma of mind, but I do think, that in the end, by some "magic" that science does not comprehend, the soul finally got the upper hand and controlled the body. And so ma, healthy heart notwithstanding, died. She was ready.

I'm told by Nance that the last day when she had finished visiting with a cheerful ma she said: "I'll see you tomorrow" and ma replied: "I'll be dead by then"; and I'm told by the care worker who found ma, less than an hour later, dying, that she lay somewhat on her side and her hands were clasped together as though in prayer.


I don't know how the soul does this, but I know this was not a death of despondency. Everybody who knew ma those last days speaks of what a joyful, warm woman she was. Ma, somehow, in a deep way, had made a decision, and the body obeyed the soul, and that decision was this: That she had lived a life...that was completed...and that could end.